


don't know how long till i feel, till i feel at home

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Childhood Friends, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Steve Harrington is a Sweetheart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25238617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: “Come on, Katherine, you know Danny’s no good at waiting tables—” Frank breaks off when he looks up from the griddle and sees the bruises and swelling on her face, phantom marks from the hits someone else took. “Shit.”That’s fair.“Sorry, Frank,” Katherine says, grabbing the ketchup and hot sauce she knows Danny didn’t run to 12. “Won’t happen again.”Frank looks like he wants to say several things, but stops himself. “At least you know you have one, kid,” he says gruffly, turning back to the griddle.Katherine sets the red bottles down, hoping her smile doesn’t read like a grimace as her nose and cheeks react to the stretching of her face.So.The soulmate thing is real.
Relationships: Steve Harrington/Katherine “Kat” Tracy
Comments: 15
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nik_knows_nothing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/gifts).



**November, 1983**

Halfway through her afternoon shift at Ronnie’s diner, Katherine feels her nose break. 

She nearly drops Table 12’s pancakes, but she doesn’t, just sets them back on the kitchen window with a clatter, and sprints to the bathroom.

Her face looks fine. 

Nothing’s happened, not in real life.

But her nose feels tender, crazy sensitive, and then something hits her side, like a knee, and she buckles over.

The knuckles on her right hand are burning.

Katherine tries not to throw up, clenching the rim of the sink in the small bathroom that she’s supposed to clean at the end of the shift, the fluorescent light bulb painfully bright. She knows that steeling herself won’t make it any better, but it’s automatic, and then another blow lands. 

Six. 

Six punches, she counts, six after the slap and the knee in her ribs, then it stops. 

Katherine straightens her apron, looks up through blurry vision at her reflection in the mirror. Her cheeks are puffy, her eye is swollen, and her nose is flushed red. She doesn’t think it’ll actually break, and she counts upwards, trying to dull the pain. 

It’s an echo, she reminds herself, it’s not real.

When she makes it to seventy-five, she pushes away from the sink, flips off the lone lightbulb. 

One of the bussers apparently ran Table 12’s order out to them. From the kitchen, Frank clangs the spatula against the griddle, pointedly. 

“Come on, Tracy, you know Danny’s no good at waiting tables—” Frank breaks off when he looks up from the griddle and sees her face. “Shit.”

That’s fair. 

“Sorry, Frank,” Katherine says, grabbing the ketchup and hot sauce she knows Danny didn’t run to 12. “Won’t happen again.”

Frank looks like he wants to say several things, but stops himself. “At least you know you have one, kid,” he says gruffly, turning back to the griddle.

Katherine sets the red bottles down, hoping her smile doesn’t read like a grimace as her nose and cheeks react to the stretching of her face. 

So. 

The soulmate thing is real.

She calls Sofia that night, asking for makeup help. Of course, Sofia’s foundation is definitely not in Katherine’s shade, so that means Josie has to know too, and they all plan to meet in the locker room twenty minutes before classes start. 

“Damn, Tracy,” Sofia looks almost proud when she walks into the room. 

“You know I didn’t actually fight anyone,” Katherine shakes her head, looking in the bright mirrors. 

“Someday,” Sofia sighs. “What’s it like to have something exciting happen?”

“Yep, living the dream over here.” Katherine pokes at her face and Sofia snorts. 

She pulls a bath towel out of her bag and rolls it out on the counter by the large mirror, like it’s a tool roll on a construction site. 

“And now,” Sofia pats the makeup brushes affectionately, “we wait.”

Josie squeaks when she walks around the corner. 

“I mean,” she swallows quickly. “It’s not that bad; I wouldn’t have even noticed.”

Josie has a ziplock bag of makeup, which she surrenders to Sofia immediately, and retreats to sit on one of the benches, watching. 

The locker room is silent as Sofia mixes colors on the back of her hand, dabs a brush into it, and starts to spread the cream on Katherine’s skin. 

“So,” Sofia says, dabbing under her eyes, “Are we going to try to guess who it is?”

Josie perks up. “I like this idea.”

Katherine winces when Sofia hits a tender patch of skin. “I’m not sure looking is the right approach...I kind of hope they’re not here.”

“Right,” Sofia steps back, tilting her head as she looks at her blending, “You and your hatred of small towns.”

“Hatred?” Josie asks in a small voice.

“Hatred feels dramatic,” Katherine says quickly. “I just...if we’re both from here, then chances of leaving here are pretty slim.”

Sofia swipes a brush under her nose, making a face, “Sorry.”

She means about having to apply the makeup over the sensitive skin and also about Hawkins.

“Maybe someone in New York fell down the stairs,” Josie says. “Or got in a fight on a subway?”

“What’s Katherine’s soulmate doing in New York?” Sofia asks.

“I don’t know,” Josie shrugs. “It’s just the most opposite place of Hawkins I can think of.”

“That’s fair,” Sofia’s holding her breath as she tries to keep her hand as light and steady as possible. “Who do you think, Josie? Her publisher, for whenever she decides to write that novel?”

“I’m not publishing a novel,” Katherine shakes her head. 

“Maybe the guy who owns a coffee shop down the block?” Josie muses, unbothered. “From your publisher’s office. He could’ve stayed out late, walked on the wrong side of the street in Brooklyn, hence the black eye.” 

“Promise us you won’t move to Brooklyn,” Sofia says seriously. “No matter how much you want to be a tortured artist.”

Katherine rolls her eyes. “You’re supposed to be the artist, come on. This face isn’t painting itself.”

Josie laughs, from her bench. 

“Probably best that we’re not looking,” Josie says, after a moment. “Jeff says there was a brawl at the football game yesterday, so there’s probably a lot of bruises and stuff.”

Katherine and Sofia exchange a look.

“A brawl?” Sofia asks. 

Josie nods. “Yep.”

“I suppose,” Katherine says carefully. “Jeff wasn’t on the field when it happened?”

Josie shakes her head. “He said it was the other team’s ball, so the kicking line wasn’t in.” 

Sofia smiles, turning back to the makeup on the back of her hand. “No new bruises for you, this morning, Jo?” she asks innocently. 

Josie shakes her head. “Well, no. Why?”

“No reason,” Katherine says.

In sixth grade, two twins from Chicago moved to Hawkins; Josie had gotten her long ponytail stuck in a desk behind her, and across the room, Jeff had yelped. Katherine had noticed, told Sofia, who immediately marched into homeroom and shin-kicked Jeff. 

Across the room, Josie had calmly turned a page in her textbook, but winced, and absently rubbed her shin over her knee sock. 

Jeff swore them to secrecy. 

Sofia pulls a paper towel off the roll and wipes the back of her hand, jerking her chin to the mirror, asking Katherine’s approval. 

Katherine blinks at her reflection. “I look like a mime.”

“No appreciation for my artistry,” Sofia sighs, and rifles around in Josie’s ziploc for a compact with an alarmingly pink shade of blush. 

Katherine feels almost normal by the time the first bell rings. 

Walking the hallways, it turns out Josie is right: more than half the football team is nursing a swollen eye or busted lip. There’s a couple other accidents—apparently Steve and that Jonathan kid got in a fistfight yesterday, which is hilarious because what the hell are they trying to prove to each other, but also counts both of them out, because Katherine has no interest in competing with Nancy Wheeler. 

“Something must’ve been in the air,” Sofia mutters, assessing the array of injuries in the hallway. 

Katherine nods, relieved.

Junior year is complicated enough; she doesn’t need to add a soulmate to the mix. 

**December, 1983**

No one knows what to do when they find out about Barb.

Katherine can’t believe she was worried about covering a black eye while one of her classmates up and vanished. 

The school year feels weird, after that. 

Obviously not _that_ weird, Barb wasn’t exactly popular, but just in the little things. When the substitute teacher doesn’t know who to call on, so looks over the roster and Barbara is the first name, and the class just sits, waiting for it to register. When they’re all lining up to walk out onstage for the arbitrary awards night at the end of semester, and Meagan Hollcroft doesn’t know where to stand, because Hollcroft has come after Holland since third grade. 

Things like that. 

Christmas break comes, but it doesn’t feel exciting like normal, just slightly off.

Sofia and her family always go out to California to be with her mom’s family, and Josie always goes East to be with _her_ mom’s family, so Hawkins as a whole feels quiet.

Ronnie’s doesn’t.

Christmas weekend is one of the busiest seasons for the diner all year, and Katherine doesn’t really mind. She and Dad haven’t had a festive holiday for a couple years now, and she needs the big tips from holiday shifts anyways. 

The other waitress asked for Christmas Eve off, to be with her kids, and Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday, so it’s pretty hectic. 

She likes it busy, and so does Frank, and the chatter of a full diner almost drowns out the five songs the radio has played on repeat for the last week and a half. 

“Table 7, Tracy,” Danny says, backing into the swinging kitchen door with his arms full of dirty plates. 

Katherine looks up, sees the couple sliding into the booth, and grabs two menus. She doesn’t mean to be halfway present, but the kid at Table 15 is screaming and she can’t remember if she’s run the check to Table 2, so she doesn’t recognize the couple until she realizes they’re both staring at her. 

“Katherine!” Nancy says.

“Kat,” Steve says. 

“Nancy,” Katherine says, automatically, connecting the dots that Table 7 is the girl who lost her best friend less than a month ago and the guy who’s trying to hold her together, who’s also her next door neighbor. “Steve, hi.”

“Oh my gosh, do you go by ‘Kat’?” Nancy’s eyes are wide. “I’ve definitely only ever called you Katherine; I’m so sorry! I feel like people hate when you call them their full name and they go by a nickname, like, my brother, no one ever calls him Michael, and if someone does—”

“Uh, it’s fine,” Katherine interrupts her, hoping it isn’t rude, but wanting the guilt to stop. “It’s an old nickname.”

Old nickname. 

It’s a weird way of saying she and Steve were best friends as kids, but then middle school rolled around and he got good at basketball and being an asshole, so that ended that.

Nancy looks relieved. 

“Oh, okay,” she says, slouching slightly in the booth, and looking around. “Sorry we’re adding to the rush; it seems crazy around here.”

Table 15 baby seems to hear that as an invitation and wails louder.

“No worries; it’s my job.” Katherine smiles reassuringly, putting the menus on the table. “I’ll give you guys a second to look these over?”

Nancy nods and Katherine elects to not look over at Steve, instead pulling Table 2’s check out of her apron. “Be right back, then.” 

She does a round or two, piling dishes for Danny and the other busser to grab, dropping off ketchup bottles and running checks, before circling back to Nancy and Steve.

They order cheeseburgers and french fries, which is the diner equivalent of spaghetti and tomato sauce—the thing people order when they know they need to eat but have no appetite. 

When she drops their plates off, Nancy asks Katherine if she thinks people would read a school paper, and Katherine asks Nancy if she’s thinking of starting one, because clearly she’s already entertaining the idea. 

Nancy blushes, waves her hand, and then excitedly rattles off some ideas she’s been having.

Steve doesn’t say much.

Katherine swings back a couple of times and listens to Nancy’s opinion of the Geometry final—it occurs to her that Nancy doesn’t know she’s in Steve’s year, not hers—then the US History final, and then she brings them takeout boxes. 

Katherine’s at the register, pulling change for Table 15 when someone stands across the stainless steel bar from her.

“Hi Steve,” Katherine says, surprised. “Did I forget something?”

“Um, no. Just wanted to take care of the check. Nancy said I should save you the trip.”  
  
Katherine looks around Steve; Nancy waves cheerfully from their table.

“Oh, thanks,” Katherine hits a couple more keys on the register. “Let me finish this one first?”

Steve nods, sitting on the stool at the end of the bar. 

“You’re doing okay?” he asks, after a moment.

Katherine looks at him, wondering what prompted the question. “Fine, yeah. Why?”

Steve looks uncomfortable. “I don’t know, just seems the thing people ask.”

“Hmm.” Katherine wraps the change in bills and the receipt around Table 15’s check. “Yeah, I’m good. You?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

It’s been years, Katherine realizes, lots has changed. Her dad’s injury, her mom’s leaving, Steve being recruited for basketball, whatever happened with him and Nancy and Jonathan, and she’s sure there’s stuff in his life she doesn’t know about, stuff the grapevine doesn’t even know.

She finds his and Nancy’s tab and enters it into the register. “Two cheeseburgers and two fries, that’s $7.25.”

He hands her a $10 bill; she takes it, and punches in the numbers for the register. 

“Thanks for not bringing up Barb to her,” Steve blurts. 

Katherine looks up, surprised, then back at the girl smiling at Table 7. “Why would I have?”

Steve lifts a hand like he doesn’t know either. “Most people don’t think not to.”

That has to suck. 

Katherine knows a thing or two about everyone in town having opinions on things that aren’t their concern. 

“Sure,” she says, understanding. “If she wants an extra writer for that paper, let me know.”

Steve smiles, almost in spite of himself. “Forgot you and your stories.”

Katherine raises her eyebrows, thinking there’s a bit of a difference between her imagination and Nancy’s penchant for truth. 

“Two bucks and three quarters,” she says, “that’s your change.”

“Keep it,” Steve says, standing. 

Katherine blinks. “Steve that’s almost $3.”

“It’s Christmas, Kat,” he smiles, like that means something. “Don’t worry about it.” 

On instinct, she thinks it must be nice to have one gainfully employed parent, let alone two, but she pushes that down. It’s no one’s fault that life dealt their parents different hands.

“Thanks,” she says. “Tell Nancy Merry Christmas.”

**January, 1984**

Nancy does start the paper after all. 

She has a lot of ideas of things she wants to write on—exposés and opinion pieces and a lot of things that sound a lot like she’s chasing stories rather than deal with the fact that no one’s turned anything in about Barb. 

So, of course Katherine agrees to help out.

She coerces Sofia to write in asking for advice and makes up something pithy in response to the anonymous ‘Dear Hawkins High’ letter. She borrows an outdated encyclopedia and flips through it at the diner, writes obscure ‘This Week in History’ articles. When she and Josie are studying at Travis’ house, she copies a page from his recipe box, and publishes it under a Home Ec section.

She doesn’t think much of the nightmares, when they start.

**February, 1984**

Josie figures out about Jeff.

It’s adorable, how she really didn’t know, and Katherine and Sofia pretend not to notice when Josie leaves the diner around the time practice ends, to head back to school.

The nightmares get worse, and Katherine realizes they’re not her own.

She’ll wake up, heart pounding, unable to breathe, pulse racing. It’s not bad dreams, it’s night terrors, and she stares at the ceiling, wondering if she can take some of it.

Maybe if she breathes extra slow, extra deep, it’ll send back the other way.

She doesn’t know if the soulmate thing works that way, in reverse, but she figures it can’t hurt to try. 

**March, 1984**

Nancy has taken to coming to the diner after school; she sits at a stool at the end of the bar, reads her articles aloud to Katherine, accepting edits.

Not that Katherine provides any edits.

The whole newspaper thing is Nancy’s baby, and Katherine doesn’t really have an opinion on if ‘just’ as an adverb weakens a sentence, or lends accessibility. 

If Katherine has to guess, she’ll say that Nancy just needs someone to bounce ideas off of.

Nancy always buys a bottle of soda, just for show, to excuse her perch at the bar. 

“So,” Nancy winces at the amount of sugar in today’s orange soda, “do you think people would care more about the oil spill in the Columbia River or the assasination attempt in Belfast?”

Katherine tilts her head, folding silverware into napkins. “Which do you think?”

Nancy sighs, flipping through her notebook, scribbling notes in the column. “I’m not sure. I mean, an assasination is definitely more interesting, but I don’t think enough people at Hawkins High are up to date on Sinn Féin...at least the oil spill happened on this side of the Atlantic.”

“And Adams— what was his first name—he didn’t die, did he?”

“Gerry, with a G,” Nancy sticks her pencil behind her ear. “And no, he didn’t. Twenty bullets in the car and only three hit him.”

“ _Only_ three?” Katherine looks up from the silverware. “You’d think three would be plenty.”

Nancy frowns, pulling her pencil out again. “Yeah, not really. They hit his neck, shoulder, arm, nothing important. You’ve got to be better with stuff like that.”

Katherine looks at the top of Nancy’s head as she scribbles more into the notebook. What does Nancy Wheeler know about bullets and fatalities?

“The oil spill in the river it is, then,” Katherine says.

Nancy nods, crossing out a section of the page. “Yeah, definitely. Probably safer to write a piece against corporations than paramilitary.”

“These days, what’s the difference,” Frank mutters from the kitchen. “Order’s up for Table 6, Tracy.”

**July, 1984**

Katherine doesn’t realize the nightmares have gone, until she wakes up in a cold sweat, and it’s the first time in a while it’s happened. 

She sits up, feet on the cold floor, and walks over to her window, stares out of it. It’s really dumb, but it’s calming to look at the night sky.

Hawkins is far from a city, so the stars are bright, and they blink at her. The sky is big and she feels small and there’s something comforting in not being what the world depends on.

She breathes slower.

Presses a hand over her heart, willing it to slow, hoping she can send it backwards to him, wherever he is.

She knows he’ll talk himself out of it, eventually. 

He always does, but it sucks how long it takes him. 

**August, 1984**

The first day of school, Nancy materializes on the diner stool, talking a mile a minute. She’s torn about whether to cover the Olympics—interesting, but everyone’s doing it—or AMPTE— scientifically unprecedented, but can it compete with the Olympics?—and Katherine puts a grape soda in front of her and lets her talk herself in circles. 

In the end, she decides to run neither, in favor of a politics column, tracking the upcoming election.

“We could cover both sides of the election,” Nancy says, her voice almost dreamlike, “and since most seniors are 18, or turning 18, we could inform their vote!”

Katherine nods, wiping down the counter, not wanting to point out that Indiana hasn’t voted blue in a couple decades. 

**October, 1984**

The school year passes quickly, college application deadlines and shifts at Ronnie’s combine to toss Katherine right off balance. 

Before she knows it, it’s Halloween at the diner, and she’s tripping over discarded bits of costumes as she carries post-trick-or-treating-sustenance to tables of children and their exhausted guardians. 

Thankfully, most of her peers are at one illicit party or another, so that’s one less problem than normal to deal with. 

The diner winds down as it gets closer to closing time; Katherine assumes it’s because of curfews and bedtimes. 

The bell above the door chimes, and a very drunk, very defeated Tom Cruise impersonator stumbles through the door. 

Even Steve’s hair is droopy, so this can’t be good.

He manages to get to the bar, slumping onto a barstool, and pushing his sunglasses off his face. 

“Kat,” he says.

“Steve,” Katherine says, coming from the register to her side of the bar. “What’s up?”

“She doesn’t love me.”

“Sure she does,” Katherine says, looking around him to check her tables. “Who?”

“Nance.” Steve faceplants on the bar, a resounding smack when his forehead hits the stainless steel.

“Nancy?” Katherine thinks her tables are mostly fine, there’s only a few of them now and they’ve all paid, just lingering now, waiting out closing time. “Come on, the girl is nothing if not obsessed with integrity, there’s no way she’s dating you if she doesn’t love you.”

“Bullshit,” Steve mumbles, muffled by the counter.

Katherine looks at the head of hair on her counter; damn it, she’d wiped that down like twenty minutes ago. She feels a pressure in her forehead and she rubs her temples; of course _now_ the night is catching up to her. “Have you had any water? Recently? At all?”

“Had plenty to drink,” Steve mumbles, muffled by the counter.

“Yeah, I gathered that, but water, Steve,” Katherine presses. “Any water?”

“Told her to slow down,” he grumbles into the metal. 

She fills a glass with tap water over at the soda fountain, and sets it on the bar. “Alright, Harrington, sit up.”

“No,” he sulks.

Katherine rolls her eyes, reaching to the dispenser at the end of the bar for a straw. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

He sits up like a catapult; his forehead wrinkles as he looks at the water. “Didn’t order that.”

“That’s unfortunate, drink.”

He lowers his head to the straw instead of picking up the glass, drinks obediently, then winces when he pulls back.

“S’cold.”

Katherine takes the glass, refills it, and puts it back. “Again.”

“K.”

He drains the glass, then sighs, sitting back on the stool.

“Better?” Katherine doesn’t know how great his balance is, but she really needs him to not topple over. 

“No.” Steve says, and hiccups.

“Cool.” One of her tables is waving at her, so Katherine motions for Steve to stay put. She refills the couple’s coffee and when she gets back behind the bar, Steve has his fingers in the glass, trying to pick up ice cubes. 

“Oh, yeah, no, we’re not doing that,” she pulls the glass away from him, trading him a towel. “I don’t know where your hands have been.”

Steve looks at his hands like he’s not sure either.

She watches him for a moment, then takes the towel back, tucking it into her apron. “So, what’s going on?”

Steve makes a face, then a couple different emotions make their way across his face. He has an incredibly readable face, always has. He looks sad, then angry, then helpless, then hopeless, then blank again.

“It’s bullshit,” he says, at last.

“Most everything is,” Katherine says. “What, specifically?”

“Everything,” Steve parrots. “That’s what Nance says too.”

He looks heartbroken.

Katherine purses her lips. “Look...if this is a relationship thing, I don’t need to be in it. I’m sure it’ll all look better tomorrow.”

Steve doesn’t say anything.

“Last call, Tracy,” Frank says, and Katherine looks at the clock on the wall; it’s a quarter to midnight.

“Sit tight, okay,” she tells Steve, not like he’s listening to her. 

She goes around to the tables, reminding everyone that they’re closing in fifteen minutes and pretending not to be annoyed by the meager tips they leave. She’d had the bussers clean as the night went along, so it’s quick work flipping most of the chairs in the diner onto the tables. Her tables filter out and she turns the sign on the door—Come again, tomorrow!

Frank is cleaning in the kitchen, the griddle hissing as he pours water over it and scrapes at the caked-on grease.

Steve’s still at the bar. 

His car is in the parking lot, which is something she’s definitely going to yell at him tomorrow for. It’s not like they’re friends, but she doesn’t really need to be friends with someone to let them know they shouldn’t be drunk driving.

That means she has to take him home.

She takes off her apron, waving to Frank and the sous in the kitchen. Coming around the bar, she elbows Steve, and he looks over at her, frowning when he refocuses. 

“Kat?”

“Yep, still me. Come on, get up.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to your house; let’s go.”

“Can’t,” he turns on the stool, but frowns. “Can’t go back to mine.”

“What? Why not?”

“I have a girlfriend,” he says, voice proud.

“Oh my god,” Katherine drags her hand over her face. “Oh my god, I’m not—I’m not _propositioning_ you, Harrington, I’m getting you out of my place of work so you can faceplant somewhere else.”

“At least, I had a girlfriend,” Steve says, voice turning mopey again. “Before—“

“Alright, enough of that, come on. On your feet.”

Steve stands, like it’s automatic. He sways a bit, and Katherine thinks for a terrible moment that she’s going to have to help him walk, but apparently he’s good. He holds his arms out like he’s surfing, or something equally ridiculous, then puts his sunglasses back on.

“Joel Goodsen,” he says, “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Katherine sighs, walking towards the door. “Let’s get you home, Goodsen.”

**November, 1984**

“I think Steve and I broke up.”

Katherine’s at the register the afternoon after Halloween, wondering when her diner transitioned into a counselor’s office; she turns to find Nancy looking stricken.

“Why would you think that?” Katherine says carefully, setting a Coca-Cola bottle on the countertop. 

Nancy runs her hands through her hair, shaking her head. “I just...I don’t know. Apparently I got drunk last night and said some stuff that I didn’t mean, and…I don’t know, he seems really worked up about it.”

“If you didn’t mean it, can’t you take it back?”

Nancy sighs. “That’s what Jonathan said too.”

Katherine knows it’s not her business, it really isn’t her business, but Nancy is a good person, and she’s been good for Steve.

“He loves you,” she says, “that much is obvious. So, take it back, or don’t, but I think he’ll want what’s best for you.”

Nancy nods, staring at the counter. She frowns. “I need to tell Jonathan about the...”

She spins off the stool, Coca-Cola untouched, and rushes out of the diner.

And that, Katherine thinks, answers that.

Nancy doesn’t come by the diner on Friday, which isn’t a total surprise, but is a little unusual, since Fridays are when she and Katherine usually review what articles they want to include in Monday’s paper.

She doesn’t come on Saturday, either.

Or Sunday.

Monday morning comes, and Katherine is surprised by the number of people that stop her in the hallway to ask if there’s a new paper today. She tells them it’s off by a week; Nancy is doing some field reporting.

She hopes that’s what Nancy’s doing.

She hasn’t seen Nancy since she came to the diner on Thursday. 

Monday is her day off this week, so Katherine goes over to Sofia’s. They’re working on Sofia’s application essays, which really don’t need a lot of work at all, but Sofia needs the affirmation.

Katherine is halfway through a paragraph on the ethnic demographics in Hawkins and the shifting undercurrents therein, when suddenly she can’t breathe.

It’s a deep pain in her ribs, something swift and direct, and her lungs just won’t expand.

Sofia looks up when she drops the pen.

“What is it, what’s happening?” Sofia pushes off her bed, coming over to the desk where Katherine is sitting.

Katherine shakes her head, the stunned feeling ebbing and her chest loosening. She sucks in a breath, her lungs burning. “I-I don’t know, I think it’s the phantom thing again.”

“What the hell?” Sofia breathes, hands fluttering, “Doesn’t he know better than to go to Brooklyn again??”

Katherine laughs, in spite of herself, then gasps when the movement sends a shooting pain through her ribcage. “I think he broke something.”

“Idiot,” Sofia mutters. “Do you want to—I don’t know, would lying down help?”

Katherine breathes in slowly, still mostly shaken. “I think it was just that one blow...maybe?”

“Hopefully,” Sofia agrees. 

And for a moment, she actually believes it.

Then she feels the burning in her knuckles, a tingle like she hit something hard, and Katherine’s stomach sinks.

“I think the bed is a good idea,” she says quietly, looking at her hand. 

“Sure,” Sofia says, already pulling Katherine to her feet. “Sure, of course.”

Her hand tingles again. 

She lies down on the bed and her knuckles hurt with the third punch.

Then something crashes over her head, and her vision actually blurs. A moment later, her jawline cracks, aches. She jolts on the bed, ears ringing. Her jawline again. Her cheek. Her nose. Jaw. Nose. Nose. Ear. 

“Give it up, you bastard,” Sofia whispers, cradling Katherine’s head, petting her hair. “Just stay down, stop it.”

Her nose is bleeding, she realizes, bleeding from a break that isn’t hers. 

Sofia is crying, petting her hair, and Katherine wants it to end too, but not because he stayed down.

Fight it, she wills, pretending she can see the moon and the Hawkins sky; this has to be worth it, fight back.

Nose, forehead, jaw. 

It stops, finally, the beating stops, and Katherine’s eyes close as her head throbs.

This time, she knows it’s over.

Sofia’s dad is a doctor, and the next morning, he writes a note for Katherine. Sofia takes it into school, gives it to the teachers, explains Katherine has a fever and won’t be coming into classes for a couple of days. 

That buys them enough time to get the swelling down, and between Josie and Travis, they keep Katherine up to date on school work. 

Katherine learns to apply the makeup this time, determined to get back to school on Monday. 

The second Monday with no paper, but no one asks her this time. 

**December, 1984**

Barb has a funeral, finally. 

Nancy resumes her perch at Ronnie’s, running stories by Katherine, about a pesticide plant leak in India, and what all the USSR is doing to beat Halley’s comet. 

She seems okay.

Katherine doesn’t know if ‘healthy’ is the right word, but she’s definitely less feral in her need for news. Katherine hopes whatever kept her away from school in early November was enough to give her closure.

Things seem calm.

Steve is coming by more, which Katherine figures is due to the fact that he needs a friend even more than Nancy. 

She pours him coffee, instead of Nancy’s bottled soda; he only ever drinks a sip of it. She convinces Jeff and Joel to come by one day; the three of them consider each other with the competitiveness unique to jocks, who’re each rulers in their own domain. Katherine drops a comment about how dumb the new attendance policy is for athletes and they jump on how ridiculous it is, and Katherine smiles to herself, because it’s cute how quickly guys become friends.

Although, to be fair, she did become friends with Nancy with even less in common.

It’s good to see Steve with friends, though, not just admirers. 

He relaxes a bit, doesn’t need to be King anymore.

The second Saturday of the month is the snow ball, which Katherine wouldn’t know if it weren’t for Nancy, which is why she’s surprised when Steve walks into the diner.

“Harrington,” she says, dragging a towel across the countertop with a flourish.

“Kat,” he says, taking his normal seat.

He’s quiet tonight. 

Almost contemplative, which is a new look for Steve Harrington.

“You ordering?” she asks, almost out of habit.

Steve looks up, startled. “Uh, sure. What’s good?”

Katherine looks at the chalk on the blackboard by the kitchen. “Chicken and waffles special?”

“Yeah, that,” Steve says.

Katherine checks her other tables while he stares at his hands on the countertop. When she sets his food down, he still hasn’t moved, and Katherine sighs internally. 

“You were at the dance, weren’t you?”

“No,” Steve says, immediately. His eyes flit away, guilty. “Course not. It’s for middle schoolers.”

“You have more middle school friends than most middle schoolers,” Katherine says, pushing the plate closer. “Pretty good excuse to be there.”

“I didn’t go in,” he says, weakly.

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound any less creepy.”

“I was dropping off Dustin.”

Katherine pulls an envelope of cutlery from under the counter, sets it in front of Steve. “You see anyone else of interest, while you were there?”

Steve huffs, unwrapping the silverware. “That obvious?”

Katherine smiles, sympathetic. “I mean, I feel a lot better thinking you’re moping over your ex than over a middle schooler.”

Steve rolls his neck. “Point taken. Is there syrup?”

Katherine grabs a bottle for him, then does a round for her other tables. When she comes back, Steve is eating methodically, which is better than not eating, but still makes her feel bummed out.

“You want to talk about it?” she asks, keying in Table 18’s tab to the register.

“No,” Steve says. “Not much to talk about.”

“Always something to talk about,” Katherine counters, and waits.

Steve pushes a quadrant of waffle around his plate. “I mean, it’s been like three months. I should be like, better by now.”

“A month and a half,” Katherine says. “You don’t get to count October and December when it was the last night of October and we’re only a couple weeks into December.”

Steve swipes butter over the quadrant. “I guess. Just thought I’d feel different by now?”

“And how do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” Steve’s hands still. “Not awful, not bitter. Just kind of...disappointed.”

“Do you wish she was with you, instead of Jonathan?”

  
Steve shakes his head, frowning at his plate. “Nah. She’s happier with him.”

“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t happy with you.”

“No, I know.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and Katherine thinks that maybe he’s doing better than he thinks. 

**January, 1985**

Katherine’s five minutes late to her shift and she almost gets away with it, but then Frank clears his throat pointedly.

“Your cousin’s here,” he says from the kitchen, as Katherine’s tying her apron behind her back.

Katherine’s cousins live in Texas.

“Who is?” she asks, finally getting the string to tie.

“Your cousin,” Frank says, head appearing in the kitchen window to point with a spatula. “Over there.”

At Table 6 are five kids that Katherine definitely does not know, one of whom has bright red hair.

“All redheads aren’t related, Frank,” she sighs, punching her timecard. 

Frank looks genuinely surprised. “She’s not your cousin?”

“My dad’s sister’s family barely calls for Christmas; they haven’t been to Indiana in years.”

Frank goes back to the grill as Katherine grabs a handful of menus and walks over to Table 6, the inhabitants of which are pretending to not notice her. 

“Hey, cuz,” Katherine says, setting down the menus. “How’s grandma?”

“She kicked the bucket last week; God rest her soul,” the girl says cheerfully. “I’m Max.”

“Hi, Max,” Katherine says.

“This is Lucas,” Max points, starting with the guy on her left, “and that’s Mike, Will, and Dustin.” 

Katherine follows her pointing around the table—Lucas has a cool jacket, Mike’s looks tall, even sitting, Will has a bowl cut, and Dustin’s the one who actually smiles at her.

“Cool,” Katherine says, focusing back on Max, “Why’d you tell my cook we’re related?”

“Someone,” Dustin says, and everyone looks at Mike, “decided it was a good idea to lead with ‘does Kat work here’, and he looked real suspicious.”

“The cook, not Mike,” Will says. “Mike didn’t look suspicious, just sounded creepy.”

“We didn’t see her, okay,” Mike interjects, “and I didn’t want to wait around in case we got the diner wrong.” 

“So Max said she was in town and was supposed to meet you here, so he let us sit down,” Lucas finishes.

So that was the wrong question to ask. 

“Um,” Katherine says aloud. “Okay, so why were you looking for me?”

“Can you drive us to Indianapolis?” Mike says, and Katherine gets the feeling that beating around the bush is not this kid’s forte.

“What now?”

“It’s for Steven,” Dustin says it like it makes anything make more sense.

Katherine looks at them. “Wait, how do you guys know Steve?”

“He dated my sister,” Mike says.

“Everyone knows Steve,” Max says.

“We’re friends,” Dustin says.

“Okay,” Katherine says, trying to register one of the responses, much less the litany she’s getting, “And how does that get back to me?”

“His birthday’s tomorrow,” Dustin starts. 

“Yeah,” Lucas jumps in, “We’ve been searching for the perfect gift and found a listing for one in the paper, but it’s down in Indianapolis.”

“And we can’t bike, in case it snows,” Mike explains.

“Well, and also, it’s like fifty miles away,” Dustin supplements.

“But basically,” Will starts, “since he’s our friend and we know you guys are friends—”

“We thought you’d help us,” Will finishes. 

Katherine blinks.

Are she and Steve friends? Has that happened again?

Huh.

“Guys, I’d love to help, but I’m literally at work—”

“Frank says tomorrow is your weekday off,” Max says helpfully.

“Of course he did,” Katherine mutters.

“We’ll reimburse you for gas,” Lucas adds, and Will adds some truly soulful puppydog eyes, that Katherine feels the sinking suspicion is just how his face works. 

“It won’t take that long,” Mike says. “We can go after school.”

“And it’s for his birthday.”

Katherine looks around the table; this is the weirdest Tuesday she’s had in a while.

It’s not like she has plans for tomorrow anyways, and it is for Steve’s birthday...but it’s a heck of a drive for a favor for strangers. She needs Sofia to materialize, remind her how to say ‘no’, but sadly, she doesn’t appear, so Katherine doesn’t say no. 

“Okay, fine,” she agrees, and the table high fives each other dramatically. “I’ll be at Hawkins Middle School at 3 tomorrow; I get gas money and sour patch kids.”

“Sour patch kids?” Will asks.

“The roadtrip snack of choice,” Max says, voice sage. “I approve.”

“Great,” Katherine says, wondering what else they would’ve agreed to. “Are you guys going to order?”

They decide on sodas and a couple orders of tater tots, and Katherine slips the ticket to Frank, wondering what the heck she’s signed on for. 

Turns out, it’s a radio.

She regrets asking for specifics, because Dustin and Lucas chatter back and forth for the better part of twenty minutes why this particular radio is perfect.

“We got ours in a set,” Will says, once they’ve talked themselves out. “They don’t sell them individually, and we haven’t wanted to buy a pack of six, but we want Steve to have one.”

“Thanks for the explanation,” Katherine says, and Will nods solemnly. 

They get the radio and then they get McDonald’s because Katherine needs some caffeine and the group seems thrilled at the concept of fries, and it’s not like her car is exactly brand new.

At some point, Mike winds up in the front seat. 

“So,” he says, dunking a fry in barbecue sauce and making direct eye contact with Max, who’s been yelling that ketchup is the only acceptable condiment, “how do you know Steve?”

“We’re neighbors,” Katherine says, and in the rearview mirror, Max sticks out her tongue at Mike. 

“Oh, cool,” Mike says. “So you can drop us by his house.”

“But your bikes are at school.”

Mike shrugs. “We can call Mrs. Sinclair from Steve’s.”

Katherine looks sideways at Mike, who’s looking very content with himself. “You knew we were neighbors already, didn’t you?”

He shrugs.

Katherine doesn’t mind, truthfully, but it is unnerving how much all of the kids seem to know about Steve, and her, by proxy. 

“How long have you guys been, like, friends with Steve?”

Mike dunks a handful of fries into the barbecue sauce, like he’s curious how many he can fit into the little plastic container. “A year? Maybe a little more...last winter, I guess.”

Katherine nods. 

Winter means that sunset comes early; the highway is turning blue in the fading light, tail lights turning their side red, and oncoming traffic flipping their headlights on. 

“I always thought it looked like a diamond bracelet,” Katherine says absently, as they crest a hill, and pairs of white light greet them. 

She doesn’t realize the car’s fallen quiet, until Dustin swears under his breath when he drops a fry. Katherine looks up, and four faces in the rearview mirror are staring at her.

“The headlights,” she explains. “Just a bunch of bright, shining squares, in a row.”

“Like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Will says, after a beat. “My mom doesn’t like that movie, but Jonathan made us watch it because he likes the book.”

Of course Jonathan likes Truman Capote, Katherine thinks. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Like that.”

The sky goes from blue to gray to navy and as the lights get brighter, Katherine has to crack a window because the remaining fries start smelling stale. But, they hit Hawkins around 6, which really isn’t bad time at all. 

The group piles out of her car with a chorus of ‘thank you’s and they traipse across the lawn to Steve’s front door. 

Katherine checks the backseat and there’s a couple of wrinkled napkins on the floor. She crawls into the backseat to get them and when she comes back out of the car, the group is yelling a pitchy rendition of Happy Birthday at the closed Harrington house.

She shakes her head and goes inside. 

Dad’s in the living room, like always, and he looks up from the murder mystery he’s reading.

“Find out who did it?” Katherine asks, hanging her jacket and keys by the door.

“Not officially,” he says, holding up the book to show that he’s only halfway through. “I think it’s the sister, though.”

“Yeah?”

“I think she wants to get back in her great aunt’s will.”

Katherine crosses the room, flipping on the lamp by her dad’s wheelchair so he’ll have better light. “What did I tell you about shadows from the overhead light?”

Dad waves a hand. “It’s fine. How was the roadtrip?”

“Also fine. Haven’t babysat in years, but it was only a little weird. Eat yet?”

He shakes his head and so she heads into the kitchen. There’s chili in a frozen bag in the freezer from a batch she made a couple weeks ago; in a perfect world she’d let in defrost in the fridge, but really, who has enough foresight for that. 

She sets the block in a pot on the stove and starts hacking away at it with a wooden spoon.

The chili heated through when the doorbell rings.

“Are we expecting someone?” Katherine calls, poking the red liquid.

“I’m not,” Dad calls back.

Katherine sets the wooden spoon in a mug on the counter, turns down the heat and pads into the foyer, flipping on the porch light and looking through the peephole.

It’s Steve.

Katherine looks behind her, into the living room, where Dad’s still engrossed in his book, and then opens the door. 

“Steve, hi.”

“Hey,” he says, like he’s surprised she answered. His arms are crossed over his chest; it’s winter in Indiana and he’s in a sweater. 

“Uh, come in,” she says, not because that makes sense but because it’s freezing. 

He steps into the foyer and looks around. 

Katherine shuts the door, looks at him. He hasn’t been in the entryway in years. 

“Shoes off,” she says, pointing. “I have chili on the stove, so…”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he says, kicking off his shoes. 

She nods, retreating to the kitchen.

Dad clears his throat when she walks through the living room. “Is that—”

“Sure is,” she says, because what even is her life. 

The chili is just starting to boil, which is pretty great timing, and also a mercy, because she has something to do with her hands.

She hears Steve come into the kitchen, and the wood creaks as he tries to decide where to stand in the small space.

“Just stay put,” she says, because there’s nowhere else for him to go.

“K,” he says, then nothing else.

“Do I want to know why a radio?” she asks, when she realizes he won’t say anything. 

“Not really,” he says, but there’s something like amusement on his voice, so she guesses it was a good gift, and she doesn’t need to understand why.

Katherine looks up from the pot; Steve is staring out the kitchen window, in the distracted way when you don’t see anything at all, but you’re still looking.

“Well,” she says quietly. “They were pretty excited to get it for you. It’s sweet of you to spend time with them, with all that happened with Will, even though you and Nancy are…”

She trails off, not sure how to say ‘even though you don’t have to do the surrogate brother thing to Mike now because she’s your ex’. 

Steve nods, still staring. 

Katherine gets a couple of bowls down, almost nervous. 

“Not to be rude,” she says, cabinet door still open, “should I be getting three bowls?”

Steve rejoins her in the realm of the cognizant, shakes his head before he remembers words are helpful too. 

“Uh, no, thanks. My dad’s grilling something anyways.”

“Sounds good,” Katherine says.

He doesn’t move.

She spoons the chili into the bowls and starts setting the table. She remembers in Steve’s house, they have a separate dining room, where Mrs. Harrington would bring dinner in from the kitchen to the family to eat. Katherine turns around from the stove and the table is already there. 

“Can you get the—”

“Sure,” Steve interrupts, reaching for the paper napkins at the end of the table when Katherine points. 

He sets them to the right of the bowls, and Katherine refolds them, putting them on the left side. “Steve, if your dad’s grilling, why are you here?”

“Right,” he says, hands in his back pockets, rocking back a little.

If she knew better, she’d say he looks nervous. 

“Uh,” he looks down at the bowls of chili, then back at Katherine. “Yeah. Just wanted to, you know, say thanks.”

Katherine frowns. “For what?”

“For driving the party down to Indianapolis.”

“The who?”

Steve laughs, quick and it’s gone. “Uh, the kids. Dustin and Mike and the rest, they call themselves the party; don’t ask.”

Katherine nods, making a mental note. “Good to know. I mean, no worries. It was my day off, and they’re a good group.”

“Sure, but you didn’t have to.”

It’s not a question, but something in how he said it makes it seems like he’s asking. She’s not sure what, but something. 

Katherine looks up from the place settings, at Steve Harrington in her family’s kitchen. Taller than the last time he was here, but shorter than when she’s thought of him, over all these years. Almost uncertain, like he’s not sure why he’s here either.

She smiles. “You’re welcome, Steve,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

He looks at her for a moment, then he smiles too, small. “Thanks.”

The floorboards creak at the entry of the kitchen; Katherine’s dad wheels himself in. 

“Steven,” he says, nodding at the two of them. “You staying for dinner?”

“Mr. Tracy,” Steve says, automatically. “Uh, no; my dad’s grilling. Just wanted to talk to Kat about something...I should head home.”

Dad nods again, satisfied with the explanation. “Been a while since we’ve seen you around, kid.”

Steve tips his head in acknowledgment. “Yeah, it has been. I’m headed out though...see you at the diner, Kat?”

“Sure,” she says. “See you.”

He smiles and nods and Dad smiles and nods, and then Steve leaves. 

Katherine sits down, eats chili with her dad, and they talk about the murder mystery and why the sister wouldn’t just hire another lawyer while the great aunt was alive, and not why Steve Harrington was just in their house again. 

**February, 1985**

“Okay,” Nancy says, flipping through her notebook, and taking an exaggerated sip of the (newly released! Frank is really proud that they’re already carrying it) Cherry Coca-Cola, “Do you think the people care more about the Dow Jones record set last week, or the list of stores supposed to be at the Starcourt mall?”

Katherine looks up from refilling ketchup bottles. “Is that a trick question?”

Nancy tips her head. “Okay, fair. Do you think it’ll be as bad as everyone thinks?”

“Who thinks it’ll be bad?”  
  
Nancy taps her pencil against the counter, turning back a page. “Everyone who owns a small business.”

Katherine wonders if Nancy classifies Ronnie’s as a small business.

“I’m sure you’ll capture both sides of the story,” she reassures Nancy, who wrinkles her nose at her notebook.

“I feel like there’s so much more, like, important stuff that I could be reporting on, you know?”

Katherine thinks about how she’s writing fluff pieces on what colors are on trend for Spring ‘85, like she has special insight into fashion, and isn’t just guessing based off what Whitney Houston wore to the Grammys.

She also thinks about how a lot of people in town find Starcourt opening to be a threat to their livelihood, and that, as far as Hawkins goes, there really isn’t much that’s “more important”. 

“Everything’s important,” she says, not because she believes it, but because the journalist in Nancy needs to hear it. “All stories just need a voice.”

Nancy looks up from the notebook, nodding resolutely. “You’re absolutely right.”

**March, 1985**

It’s Danny’s fault, really.

He’s gotten lax about storing stuff behind the counter, hoping Frank wouldn’t catch on, but of course Frank did, and now the cook is on a _Nothing Behind The Counter Except Ketchup Bottles And Dirty Dishes_ penchant. Which is all well and good, and Katherine’s in favor of respecting company property, but it is unfortunate that she can’t just stash Steve’s jacket when he leaves it behind, as she could’ve a month ago. 

Today, Frank swears on his mother’s grave (Katherine’s pretty sure that not only is his mother still alive, but she sits on the committee at Hawkins Town Halls) that if it’s there when they shut down for the night, he will personally drive it down to the Salvation Army.

Which is why Katherine is sitting in her driveway, blaming Danny for the fact that she can’t just go into her house, but has to go over to Steve’s, to drop this off. 

Hypothetically, it’s not a big deal to knock on her neighbor’s door. 

Realistically, there’s no way anyone other than Mrs.Harrington answers the door, and Katherine’s fake smile is looking dangerously close to a grimace, after the end of a school-and-work day. 

She stretches it on nonetheless, and taps on the door. 

There’s a clicking that echoes inside the house and Katherine has time to question what kind of superhuman wears heels at 10pm on a weeknight when Mrs. Harrington opens the door. 

She looks like it might as well be 10am.

“Katherine,” she beams, a hand coming up to smooth her hair. “Steve said you’d be coming by, come in!”

“That’s okay, I just wanted to—” Katherine breaks off. “Wait, Steve said what?”

“Now, I know it’s late,” Mrs. Harrington says, and if Katherine isn’t mistaken, there might just be something behind the perfect smile. “We’re just having dessert.”

Katherine looks at her watch on default, and Mrs. Harrington waves a hand. 

“I know, I know, it’s quite late. Robert’s family lives in Washington, you knew that, of course, and tonight is the monthly call, and we are so happy you could make it by.”

Katherine did not remember that Mr. Harrington’s family lives in Washington, and she doesn’t know what a monthly call has to do with her, but before she knows what’s happening, Mrs. Harrington practically pulls her into the foyer.

It looks different than it did years ago. 

Different wallpaper, Katherine muses, more current. Fresh flowers in the entryway table, umbrellas and keys hung by the door instead of snowshoes and ice skates; it looks like a place where grown ups live. 

“Steven,” Mrs. Harrington calls delicately, deceptively loud.

The expected head of hair appears in the doorway, and a look of relief washes over his face.

“Kat!” he says brightly. “Hey!”

Mrs. Harrington smiles again, slightly more naturally now, still strained. “Lovely. I’ll go get some coffee then.”

And she’s gone, leaving Katherine in the foyer of a house she had zero intention of stepping into, and zero idea what’s happening.

“Okay, so before you panic, thanks for bringing my jacket.” Steve’s in front of her in the foyer, looking nervously back to the family room.

Katherine looks down at her hands, the jacket in them. “Right, the jacket...what’s going on?”

Steve is looking everywhere but at her, a very clear _I’m about to lie, I wonder what she’ll buy_ look on his face, before he gives up. “Okay, hear me out—”  
  
Katherine shakes her head. “Steve, did you leave your jacket on purpose? What the heck is happening?”

“I did, but uh—”

“Steven,” Mrs. Harrington’s voice calls, a tinge of urgency on her voice.

“Yeah, just a sec, Mom,” he calls back, before looking at Katherine and lowering his voice. “Okay, look, you can be mad at me tomorrow, but right now I need a favor.”

“It’s 10:15 and I’ve been on my feet since my shift started at 3; this’d better be good.”

“It’s not good, but I’ll owe you, big.”

Katherine doesn’t know what to do with that, but she knows it means she’s not leaving. She sighs, kicking out of her shoes. “Okay, thirty-second pitch.”

Steve braces himself. “My dad has this really weird rivalry with his older brother and it’s like weird weird, okay, not just normal sibling stuff, anyways, Brian, that’s my cousin, he’s my year and he does football, so that’s a fun parallel thing, he’s actually probably going to get an athletic scholarship though, but no, Brian’s cool, it’s my Uncle has just been going off on how proud he is of him, and so when that happens my dad has to one up him and it’s just been escalating—”

“I feel like you’re over 30 seconds,” Katherine interrupts.

“Right,” Steve says, drawing himself up. “You have to pretend to be my girlfriend.”

Katherine’s hanging her jacket on the coat rack; she freezes. “I’m sorry, what now?”

“It’s a whole thing, I told you, and it’s really weird and I’m sorry, but basically Uncle Ken has been really passive aggressive about how great Brian’s girlfriend is, bonding with my Aunt and all, and I didn’t really tell my dad about how Nancy and I…”

“So,” Katherine pinches the bridge of her nose, “You need me to go in there, get on the phone with your Aunt and Uncle, and pretend I’m Nancy freaking Wheeler, so your dad can one up his brother?”

“Well, my dad didn’t know Nance, so he never brought her up by name, so actually you can just be you, but you know, pretend to be—”

“I cannot believe this is my life right now,” Katherine mutters.

“I’ll give you twenty bucks,” Steve says, without hesitation.

“Steven,” Mrs. Harrington calls, urgency more apparent, “your aunt and uncle are waiting!”

“Forty,” Steve says, some of that same desperation on his face, too.

Imagine having forty dollars just floating around, to spare, Katherine thinks, in part to avoid thinking about how if Steve had just asked her outright, she would’ve done it for free.

“Forty,” she says. “And you still owe me.”

“Done,” Steve says. “You’re the best.” 

She rolls her neck. “Yeah, well, we know that. Anything specific you want me to say?”

“Nope. Just be believable.”

Katherine stops herself from saying that she’s worked at a diner and been in high school, she’s got a pretty solid poker face in her back pocket. “Alright, let’s go.”

Mr. Harrington looks decently sheepish when they walk into the room, and Mrs. Harrington looks terrified; they’re clustered around a small table in the middle of the living room. Steve sinks into one of the chairs, pointing for Katherine to join him, and Katherine looks down at the table,

It’s an Ericovox.

She knows about them, obviously, speakerphones have been around for a couple years now, but she doesn’t know anyone who had one. Except apparently, she does, because the Harringtons have one.

Great.

“Hey Uncle Ken,” Steve says, and Katherine wonders if his Uncle can hear the fake cheer on his voice. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s alright,” booms a voice through the other end, kind of echoey, and Katherine has a mental image of a family, three hours West, huddled around a Ericovox in their dining room. “Heard you had an important lady to pick up.”

The room is silent and Katherine realizes they’re waiting for her to speak. 

Just like that, huh, she thinks, and smiles to make her voice brighter. 

“Yeah, that’s me,” she says, in her best table waiting voice. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Harrington. My name’s Katherine.”  
  
“So, you are real after all,” the man says, chuckling. Katherine thinks she might hear an echo of laughter, and feels a tinge of sympathy for the family gathered on the other end of the line, subject to the same ridiculous family ritual. Although, Mrs. Harrington had just said Steve’s ‘aunt and uncle’ were waiting, so maybe it’s just the heads of the house...

Katherine looks up, and Mrs. Harrington is looking gratefully at her; she clears her throat. “Um, yep, that’s me. In the flesh, over airwaves, or however these things are connected.”

“Radio waves, actually,” says the voice, with a hint of smugness. “My nephew tells me you’re a writer?”

“I write for the school paper,” she says automatically, looking back at Steve. He’d said they hadn’t mentioned Nancy, but it’s more likely that he told them about Nancy than about her. “They were short a pen name, so I jumped in.”

“She’s being modest,” Steve interjects, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees so his head is closer to the Ericovox. “She and this other girl started the paper from scratch, and they cover everything—politics, local business, even predicting trends and stuff like that.”

Katherine didn’t know he read the paper, much less in that detail, but she’s more surprised by the reference to Nancy as ‘this other girl’. As if she wasn’t the light of Steve’s life for the last year and a half. 

Steve looks back at her and shrugs, noncommittal, and they wait for the response.

“That sounds like a lot of initiative, young lady,” the man says. “That’s good for a girl to have. Brian’s Sarah is on the debate team at her school, you know. She’s away at a competition this week.”

Katherine doesn’t know what to say to that. 

She’d been warned it’d be petty, but she’s still surprised to hear a grown man talk about his son’s relationship like it’s a tribute to him. Although she supposes that’s exactly what Steve’s dad is doing too.

“Sarah sounds really talented,” Katherine says; it feels lame. “And I’m sure debate team looks great on college applications.”

“Sure does,” the man crows. “USC is looking at her, for their collegiate team. What about you, Katherine? Where are you applying to college?”

Katherine bites her lip; it’s the question on everyone’s mind, but at this point, she’s sick of answering it. 

She’s been accepted to Indiana University, Purdue, and Indiana State, but with only partial scholarships towards tuition...with the mortgage and Dad’s medical bills, Katherine needs at least a full-tuition scholarship.

Notre Dame is her last shot, which sucks, because she knows the odds, but none of that is worth anything on this call with a judgey family member in Washington. 

“I’m still weighing my options,” she says lightly. “Purdue is the forerunner right now, but Notre Dame doesn’t send their acceptances back until mid next month.”

The man whistles. “Notre Dame, my my. You’ve got quite the achiever on your hands, Steven. How did you two meet?”

“I live next door,” Katherine says.

“At the diner, where she works,” Steve says, at the same time.

Mrs. Harrington makes a small, stressed whimper sound, and Mr. Harrington goes impossibly still. 

“Oh, you work at a diner?” the voice on the line says, and Katherine wants to laugh at the superiority on his voice. As if he’s not the one with his own family, calling to meddle in his brother’s affairs and pull a random girl into it. 

In for a penny, she thinks...

“At the diner,” Katherine begins to salvage, “where I have an internship.”

Mrs. Harrington’s eyes widen; she looks equal parts terrified and hopeful when she realizes Katherine’s about to start straight up lying.

“An internship?” Uncle Ken says, doubtfully.

“Yes,” Katherine recovers. “An internship. You see, I have an interest in business, it’s what I want to study in the fall, and I thought an internship would be great for my resume, in addition to my working on the paper. It’s been great managerial experience, learning supply chain, balancing books, managing employee complaints and records—well, I don’t want to bore you. I’m sure Brian has had a similar internship, for when he starts his business program in the fall?”

Of course, it’s a stab in the dark that Brian’s planning on being a business major.

But really, with a father like Uncle Ken and an athletic scholarship over his head, what else is he going to be?

Steve’s chair is shaking as he’s trying not to laugh, Mrs. Harrington looks like she might cry, and Mr. Harrington looks like he might even smile. 

The line is quiet.

“Brian has been spending a lot of time on his studies,” a soft voice says over the line, and Katherine blinks. 

She’d forgotten there were others on the line.

“Mrs. Harrington,” she says automatically. “Hi. I should’ve asked who else was there, I’m so sorry. I’d love say hi to Brian; Steve’s talked about him a bit.”

“Those two were close,” the woman says, and Katherine can hear the smile on her voice, “when we lived in Hawkins. You know how things go though, and we moved out here...but no, he’s not here. I know it’s late there, but here, he’s still at practice.”

Both rooms are quiet.

After a moment, Steve’s aunt clears her throat. 

“Well, I’m sorry we interrupted your story, dear,” she says. “Of how you met—diner or next door?”

“Oh,” Katherine says, backtracking, she’d honestly forgotten that’s where this began. “Right. Well, we grew up next door, actually. Steve and I were kids together.”

“But you reconnected at the diner?” Mrs.Harrington’s voice prompts her over the phone.

Yeah, when he came in with his actual girlfriend.

Mercifully, Steve leans closer to the speaker himself, and she’s happy to let him share this one.

“That’s right, Aunt Carol,” he says. “You know, I started sports when middle school rolled around; I didn’t see as much of Kat when I picked up basketball.”

“That’s half the story,” Katherine interjects, just to sell it, “Steve became Mr. Popular when he got really good; everyone was obsessed with him and I couldn’t compete. Did you know they actually call him ‘The King’ at school?”

Everyone laughs politely.

“Don’t tell me you ignored the girl next door for a cheerleader,” Aunt Carol says softly. 

“Sarah is a cheerleader,” Ken interjects pettily, and Mrs. Harrington looks positively delighted at that tidbit. 

“Yes, of course, dear,” Aunt Carol says, appeasing. “Nothing wrong with a cheerleader. What happened though?”

Katherine is mentally racing through all of the people who’ve written into her column at the paper, trying to think of a story she can borrow, when Steve starts talking again.

“I came into the diner one night, with a friend, and she was there. It was weird, because I knew she was there, or hadn’t left at least, but we hadn’t talked in years at that point.”

“A lot had happened,” Katherine adds, trying to help him, remind him that the point of this was to upsell him to Ken. 

“Ah, sure,” Steve amends. “I don’t know, I guess so. But I kept coming back. At school, on the court, with everyone else, I was supposed to be Steve Harrington, the king...but with Kat, she just talked to me like me. When I needed someone, she was there. It was different, you know? Easy. Everything got a lot less complicated when she was there.”

Katherine blinks, looking at Steve’s profile. He’s staring at the Ericovox, a funny expression on his face.

“You never told me that,” she says, quietly.

He doesn’t look at her, but he smiles slightly. “It’s not really a great line to give a girl, is it?”

Katherine thinks it’s maybe one of the best she’s heard, but she doesn’t say it.

Mr. Harrington coughs a bit.

Right.

“Um, anyways,” Katherine cuts in, thinking of the story she’s supposed to be telling, and then of Dustin, the one of the Party who seems to like Steve the most. “There’s this kid I babysit, and I didn’t know it, but Steve actually mentors him. There’s a program that pairs middle school kids and high schoolers, you know the type. Anyways, Dustin spent a lot of time with both of us and decided to play cupid, and we just ended up together.”

It’s a lame ending, she knows, but it’s the best she can do. 

Mrs. Harrington is nodding encouragingly, so that’s something.

“That’s sweet,” Aunt Carol says. “Don’t you think, dear?”

“Yes, yes, very sweet,” Ken echoes, then clears his throat. “Tell me, Robert, did you decide to upgrade your television for the Olympics? I know last time we were talking, I recommended the..”

Katherine tunes out the conversation as Mr. Harrington answers the question and it fades away from her.

Steve hasn’t shifted, his elbows still on his knees. Now that she’s settled back, she can only see a part of his face, and what she can see, she isn’t sure what she reads. 

This isn’t real, they both know it. 

It’s a lie and a flimsy one at that, for petty rivalry’s sake. But the first part of his story, that much was real. 

And, though she’ll never admit it, a small, irrational, fanciful, part of Katherine wonders what else might have been. 

**April, 1985**

They don’t talk about it, of course. 

It’d be weird, and they have enough going on with senior year and college apps, and shifts and sports and everything, so Steve gives her a $40 tip one day, and they call it square. 

A couple weeks later, it’s a slow Thursday shift, coming up on evening. 

Steve is working on Calculus at the counter and Frank is humming to himself in the kitchen, and Katherine watches the mailman pull away. 

So, maybe it’s not the most professional thing to have her mail delivered to Ronnie’s. 

But, in her defense, she’s there more often than not, and if it goes home, Dad might see it. And since she only applied to the four colleges, it’s only four abuses of employee privilege. Well, three, since Notre Dame’s response still hasn’t yet arrived.

But today, there’s a blue and yellow envelope in the mail pile, and her stomach flips. 

She tucks the thick material into her apron, busses another table, tries to ignore it.

After she’s run the latest round of orders, she knows she has a break; she leans against the counter, behind the bar, lets out a slow breath, and breaks the seal, and skims the letter. 

_On behalf of The University of Notre Dame, I am delighted to extend to Miss Katherine Tracy an offer of admission ...a great addition to our school...to complete the enrollment process please...pleased to provide an academic and needs-based scholarship of $7,500 per year, equivalent to nearly 80% of the annual tuition…_

Eighty percent.

Katherine stares at the envelope, the beautiful blue and gold envelope.

Eighty.

On autopilot, she moves over to the soda fountain, picking up a glass and holding it under the spigot.

That’s 20% short of enough.

The diner dulls around her, tables and dishes and the static on the radio. This is the next decade of her life, and the decade after that, and after that; this diner, this town. No New York, no publisher, no novel, just Hawkins. 

The glass shatters.

It’s a cracking sound, loud across the diner, and she can’t fully break the glass, obviously, because just the shards of it are large jagged and ugly.

That was dumb, Katherine thinks. 

She looks at her hand, surprised, knows the damage will only worsen if she clenches her fist as she wants to. Her palm stings red and she winces, the glass like daggers of diamonds. Katherine tips her palm, the glass cascading down to the floor, sparkling, bleeding, and she thinks that was a really, really stupid thing to do. 

She’s never leaving Hawkins.

Frank barges out of the kitchen, dragging Katherine over to the industrial sink behind the bar. Katherine hisses when the cold water rinses over her hand, the glass and blood mixing in the deep sink.

Absently, she tucks the letter back into her apron, coming back to herself and taking her hand out of Frank’s. She waves apologetically at the customers, it’s fine, she’s okay, sorry to interrupt. They titter, but go back to their conversations. 

“You’re lucky we have cheap glass,” Frank mutters. “If it were any thicker you might’ve needed stitches.”

Lucky.

Katherine shakes her head, feeling far from lucky.

“Thanks, Frank,” she says. “Sorry about that. I’m good.”

The man huffs to himself, and snaps his fingers at the busser, who comes in with a broom. Katherine steps aside to let him get under the fountain, shakes her hand over the sink, wrapping it in a paper towel. 

It hurts, definitely hurts, but Frank was right about the cheap glass and the shallowness of the cuts. She tightens the towel around it, feeling brown eyes on her. 

“I’m fine, Steve,” she says, wrapping her hand. She looks up at him and he looks down, away. He’s holding his own hand, probably surprised by her outburst.

That’s fair; she’s pretty surprised too.

Steve is frowning at his Calculus textbook, definitely not reading, blinking slowly. 

“Uh,” he says, after a moment. “What was that?”

Katherine flips the envelope onto the counter. Looks at it, the blue and gold against the stainless steel. Steve looks up at her. 

“What you said to Ken was true? You applied to Notre Dame?”

“Sure did,” Katherine doesn’t touch the envelope, leans her elbows on the bar, head suddenly incredibly heavy. “They’d take me, too. I just have to come up with $2,000 a year.”

It hangs in the air for a minute, and then Steve jerks his chin a bit. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” Katherine draws in a loud breath, looking out over the diner. Interesting that she didn’t cry, didn’t consider it, just absorbed it. Until the glass broke.

“And that’s not…?” Steve doesn’t finish the question, sees her expression. 

Katherine shakes her head. “It’s not.”

Steve is quiet. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

The paper towel is seeping through and she unwraps it. Dried, her hand isn’t as red, just a couple of gashes across the center of it. It looks like any dumb adventure movie, where the hero slices open their hand to make a blood pact—cool for high fantasy, not so much for food service. 

There’s a first aid kit under the register and she reaches for it. She’s never tried to open it left-handed and the latches on the plastic are stubborn. 

“Just...here,” Steve says, and he reaches across the bar for the kit.

“It’s fine,” Katherine says, stubborn, pulling the box away from him. 

“Kat, let me help, okay?” there’s something under his voice, and Katherine almost gets it. It’s how she felt with Nancy all last year, just wanting to help, even if it’s only in the little ways. She lets go of the kit.

“Thank you,” Steve says. “Hand.”

She turns her arm over, palm up on the stainless steel, looks at it rather than at him.

Steve pulls some cotton out of the kit, gauze, some tape and a brown bottle. He uncorks the bottle, tears off a bit of the cotton and douses it. “So, this might—”

“Yeah, I know,” Katherine rolls her neck, bracing her other forearm on the counter. “Ready.”

It does sting, a lot.

She drops her forehead to her arm on the counter, gritting her teeth. 

“Sorry,” Steve mutters. “Sorry, sorry, almost done.”

Katherine blinks at her feet on the dirty diner floor. She tries to guess what Steve is doing without looking, feels his fingers moving around her hand. His touch is light, quick, pressing the clean cotton over her palm. Then the gauze; he lifts her fingers and she raises her hand so he can wrap around the back of it. Then she hears tape tearing, and the bandage is pulled tight as he secures it. 

Katherine lifts her head, chin on her arm, looking down at her hand.

Then up a bit. 

Steve is bending over the counter, his forehead creased in concentration. His hair, his ridiculous hair, is in his eyes; he looks almost careful.

He senses her gaze and looks up at her. 

He has really long eyelashes. 

Unfairly so, and it’s a weird thing to notice, but Katherine does notice.

He looks away first, back at her hand. “So,” he clears his throat, “Purdue then?”

It takes a minute for her to track what he’s asking. She’s surprised that he remembers that from the call with his family, but that had been a weird night, so it’s probably randomly ingrained in his memory.

She shakes her head. “They didn’t have full scholarships for me either.”

Steve looks up. “And Indiana U?”

“They don’t either, Steve,” she sighs. “Want to ask about Indiana State?”

He grimaces. “I get the feeling I shouldn’t.”

“That would be a correct feeling,” she says shortly.

He finishes with the bandage. 

He turns her hand over with his, inspecting the back of it, checking, and then sets it back, palm up, on the counter. He taps over the bandage, lightly, just like he’s thinking or curious, or both. Then he pulls his hands back, quickly, crosses them in front of him on the counter and looks up at her.

“You don’t want to stay in Hawkins, do you?”

Katherine sighs, tapping the bandage herself. “I certainly didn’t. Don’t know if that’s an opinion I get to have now, since I’m staying.”

Steve looks down at the counter. With his head like that, his hair falls in front of his face, so she can’t place the emotion on his voice when he asks, “What’s so bad about staying?”

Katherine looks around at the diner. The people in the booths, the spring sun filtering through the windows, the familiar voice on the radio and the rhythm of the town she’s always known.

Frank’s right.

All told, she is lucky. She has her dad, still, and he loves her. She has this job, which lets her support him, she has good friends, and things are tight but they’re not unbearable. 

“Nothing’s bad about staying,” she says. “It’s just, not what I expected. It’ll take some getting used to, is all.”

Steve nods, hair bobbing. He looks up and smiles at her, close-lipped, and Katherine feels bad. He didn’t have to help her with the bandage, or deal with her outburst, or feelings on Hawkins; for all she knows, he could love the place and never want to leave either. 

“I’ll get over it,” she says, lightly. “Lots to love about a small town, right?”

Steve is playing with his hand again, and he looks out the window, squinting at the setting sun.

“Sure,” he says. “Sure. Uh, anyways, does that feel any better?”

He points to the bandage, and Katherine wiggles her fingers. 

“Practically good as new.” 

She’s not saying a lot of what she’s feeling, but the weird part is, she thinks Steve might be doing the same thing.


	2. Chapter 2

**May, 1985**

Graduation is about as anticlimactic as everyone expects it to be. They all wear their gowns in the summer heat and no one catches their cap when they throw it up in the air at the end of the service. 

When Katherine accepts her diploma, she hears her dad cheering; she closes her eyes and imagines sending him a ‘thanks for being patient and never minding takeout dinners’. 

She sends a ‘guess what, I did it, thanks for nothing’ to her mom, wherever she is now, for good measure.

Her friends are all real excited, tackling each other in hugs, and Sofia’s dad uses an entire roll of film taking pictures of their group.

Katherine picks up KFC on the way home, and she and Dad eat it in the living room like it’s a normal Saturday afternoon.

Probably because it is. 

Frank offers to give her the night off, in case she wants to go out, but Katherine’s feeling a little melancholy about it all. 

She’s excited for her friends: Boston College for Josie, Jeff at University of Massachusetts for completely unrelated reasons, UCLA for Sofia, and Travis at a liberal arts college somewhere in Colorado. It’s all exciting, but she’s trying not to think about how this is the last bit of her life that’s parallel to her friends.

She keeps the shift at Ronnie’s.

Frank gets her a ridiculous button, yellow with red and blue confetti painted on it that says “I’m a Graduate!!”. She pins it dutifully on her apron, as if Hawkins isn’t small enough that everyone knows who graduated earlier today.

It’s still sweet of him.

The dinner rush shows more families than usual, but nothing too crazy. 

Katherine pretends she doesn’t keep checking the seat at the end of the bar. It’s not like Steve has a shortage of invitations for the night; she’s pretty sure even the twins offered for him to come to their sendoff party.He’s been scarce the last month or so, but she’d chalked that up to the busy-ness of the season. 

He’s staying in Hawkins, too. 

Steve hasn’t told her why, but it’s a sore subject, and she gets that. She suspects his reasons are different from hers—she can’t imagine the Harringtons being unable to find funding for a degree—but it doesn’t mean she’s entitled to the answer.

He doesn’t show. 

Katherine tries not to delve into why that bothers her. He’s been a good friend, better than she’d expected him to be, and his presence at the diner is something she’s just kind of come to anticipate... 

Anyways, she’s glad he’s out celebrating tonight.

The buzz around Starcourt seems to grow, and Katherine almost misses the newspaper. If this’d been happening during the school year, Nancy would’ve had plenty to write about.

As it is, Nancy gets an internship at _Hawkins Post,_ so maybe she does have enough to write about. She’s out sleuthing a lot, and doesn’t come by the diner as much; Katherine hopes that means she’s racking up some serious bylines.

At some point, she’ll stop feeling sorry for herself, figure out what sort of career she actually wants to pursue, and then make it work in a Hawkins context. But between now and then, there’s tables to be bussed and customers to serve, and with a smile big enough to keep them coming around when Starcourt opens.

When it does open, it’s the most exciting thing to hit Hawkins in a decade. 

They actually have fireworks, which is a bit premature considering it’s June, but people are into it.

Katherine tries to hold off on going to try to avoid the crowds, but Dad wants to see it, so she caves and takes him the second week it’s open. They stay on the ground floor, the part they can navigate with his chair; they get soft serve that tastes just like Dairy Queen but it’s _Starcourt Soft Serve_ , so they pretend it’s something special.

Steve has a job at the Scoops Ahoy ice cream place. 

It’s an amazingly horrible outfit, only improved by the fact that Robin Buckley, another girl from their graduating class, works there too, but she manages to pull off the blue stripes (not the red bowtie; she’s only mortal). She does have the power of knee socks, and shoes that look like Keith Harring customized them.

Katherine doesn’t know Robin that well, but she does notice that Steve fumbles a little bit more around her. If she’s reading him right—and who knows, she might not be, since she hasn’t seen much of him in the last few months—then, man, does he have a type.

When she gets her weeknight off, she takes herself back to Starcourt, amused by the line of sophomore girls that are streaming in and out of Scoops Ahoy.

She grabs a stool in the back of the restaurant, waiting for an ebb in the flow. 

“I call it The Lifeguard Complex,” says a voice at her elbow.

Katherine looks over, and Robin is next to her, watching Steve and the underclassman who are giggling at everything, then leaving before they trip over themselves.

“Patent pending?” she asks. 

“Oh absolutely,” Robin shrugs. “You know: you go to the pool to see them look pretty, but once you talk to them, the allure kind of just quickly fades.”

Katherine laughs a bit, thinking of the reaction the twins get when they go anywhere. “Same rules apply to guys who play field hockey and drive Jeeps.”

Robin snaps her fingers, pointing to Steve. “Exactly. Katherine, right?” 

Katherine smiles. “Yep. Who did your shoes?”

Robin pulls one of her feet behind her, looking down at them. “Oh, I did. Got bored in Trig last semester.”

“Nice,” Katherine says, genuinely impressed. The doodles are clean and intentional and honestly just cool. “Does that say Milk Duds?”

“I was hungry that day.”

A flock of girls push past them, and the line only grows. “Shouldn’t you be—”  
“Doing my job, serving ice cream?” Robin makes a face. “Nah, they’re not here for me. They’re here for the hair. What about you?”

Katherine blinks. “What about me?”

“You here for Steve?”

Well that was an interesting way of asking that.

Katherine shakes her head.

“I’m here to take up customer seating space and call it returning a favor; unfortunately, it only works if there’s time for light heckling.”

Robin tilts her chin up. “You a waitress?”

“At Ronnie’s, by school.”  
“Oh, the diner?” 

“Yep. We don’t have fried cheese on a stick, but we have chicken and waffles, if you’re ever inclined.”

“I might take you up on that. Shit, that’s my boss,” Robin says, before raising her voice, smiling broadly. “And that’s the thirty-year history behind how they founded Scoops Ahoy, thank you so much for asking, good customer; have a great rest of your day!”

“Are you kicking me out?” Katherine whispers. 

“A great rest of your day,” Robin announces again, and Katherine has been in customer service for too long to do anything other than leave Scoops Ahoy, and plan to return another day. 

**June, 1985**

Robin beats her to it.

It really shouldn’t surprise Katherine because, at this point, how many of Steve’s friends become fixtures at Ronnie’s? Soon enough, it’s commonplace to see Robin take a place at the bar with a book, usually something foreign. Nancy has her bottled sodas, Steve has his coffee, and Robin’s justifying-her-presence beverage of choice is a fountain coke. 

She downs it immediately after Katherine sets it on the steel, then chews on the ice for the next half hour. When Katherine drops dishes behind the bar, she’ll grab a scoop of ice from under the machine and refill Robin’s glass with ice, not soda.

“Read me something Italian,” Katherine says, as she’s keying in Table 14’s check at the register.

Robin flips back a few pages, grates down on a stubborn cube of ice, and clears her throat. “Monstrava la ruina e il crudo scempio che fe Tamiri, quando disse a Ciro: Sangue sitisti, ed io di sangue t’empio.”

It sounds pretty, all the vowels and long sounds.

“Translation?” Katherine asks.

Robin tips back the glass, taking more ice, thinking it over. “I saw the cruel slaughter and destruction that Tomyris unleashed, when she spoke over Cyrus’ cold body: ‘You thirsted for blood, now take your fill of blood.”

Katherine stares at her. 

Robin looks back, crunching.

“Table 6, Tracy,” Frank sighs, ringing the bell in front of the kitchen. “Why are your friends like this?”

Robin snorts, and Katherine runs the burgers out to Table 6.

The next time she makes it behind the counter, Robin’s pulled her feet up under her, balancing on the barstool. She’s bent over the book, mouth moving slightly to form the words.

It must be nice, Katherine thinks, to be able to travel through paper, even when you’re still in Hawkins. Sure, she can read a book just as well, but another language seems so immersive.

“Can I help you, Kat?” Robin asks, without looking up. 

Katherine wrinkles her nose. “No one calls me that.”

“Steve does.”

Katherine pulls out a towel, wiping across the bar. “Steve talks about me?”

“Don’t know if that’s a compliment,” Robin turns a page. “Pretty sure you’re the only adult friend the dingus has.”

Katherine thinks Nancy might disagree, and wonders what Robin considers herself. 

“How come you’re still in Hawkins?” she asks.

Robin looks up. “So, you really do have a thing about Hawkins.”

Katherine scrubs at a syrup puddle. “I don’t have a thing about it, I just don’t know why you’d be here if you don’t have to be.”

Robin drops one of her legs, and traces a design on the shoe still on the barstool. “It feels like, with everyone leaving for college, we all want to ditch who we were and become something new. It...took me a minute to be okay with who I am.”

Katherine’s surprised by that. She doesn't know Robin super well, but she knows about her the same way everyone who’s not popular is aware of everyone else. “You’re crazy smart; you speak like four different languages—”

“Five, if you count piglatin,” Robin amends.

Katherine looks up from the syrup smudge. “Do you?”

“Yeah, not really, no.”

Katherine goes back to the counter.

Robin switches to another design on her sneaker. 

“So,” she says slowly, “do we want to talk about how you think that the only reason someone would stay in Hawkins is if they don’t have the option to be anywhere else?”

Not really, Katherine thinks.

“Not really,” she says.

“Okay,” Robin shrugs. 

They’re quiet for a minute, the diner sounds of cutlery on plates and old rock music seeping in. 

“Personally,” Robin breaks the silence, “I have no interest in going to a university to have some balding man tell me at what temperature hydrogen combusts.”

“It’s 932 Farenheit,” Katherine mumbles. 

“Why do you know that?”

“I helped Josie study for AP Chem.”

“Unbelievable.”

“She got a 5,” Katherine says, like it helps. 

Robin blinks at her.

“What I want to do is read this,” she says, closing the book in front of her, pokes the cover with a finger, “but actually in Florence. I want to walk down a street and hear a language I’ve only read, and have pasta with sauce that doesn’t come from a can.”

Katherine thinks that that sounds pretty nice. 

“Work a vineyard in Tuscany, take a gondola in Venice?” she asks. 

“The whole shebang,” Robin says. “And the best way to do that, is to get fabulously wealthy slinging ice cream in Hawkins for a year or two, and then get a ticket to Italy.”

“So,” Katherine tucks the towel back into her apron, “being in Hawkins is a part of your grand plan.”

Robin nods. “It is.”

Katherine grabs a scoop of ice, and Robin slides her glass over. She clears a couple of tables and runs checks for the remaining ones; Robin hops off the stool when she gets back to the bar.

“I’ve got the closing shift at the mall tonight; I’m headed out.”

Katherine waves at her, keying in the checks to the register. “Thanks for coming by; I always like having company.”

Robin pauses. 

“I have family in Chicago,” she says. “They’re textbook city people. And they all love the idea of football games and snowmen in the front lawn and grabbing a milkshake at a small town diner.”

Katherine shakes her head. “Send ‘em west when winter rolls around.”

Robin laughs. “Yeah, they wouldn’t fare too well. I’m just saying...can’t hurt to romanticize our lives here, right?”  
Katherine looks over from the register. “I’m sure that, as we speak, a couple girls are waiting tables and serving gelato in Capri who can only dream of one day visiting the American midwest.”

“Okay, don’t be rude,” Robin rolls her eyes.

Katherine laughs. “Sorry.”

“Just...” Robin trails off. “You have to be here for now. You can spend every minute wishing you weren’t, or you can live your life, Hawkins in the background.”

The register dings, and Katherine fishes out Table 11’s change. Robin’s waiting, and she appreciates it, offers a slight smile.

“Thanks, Robin.”

Robin nods, salutes with two fingers, and tucks her book under her arm. “Anytime.”

She spins a bit, on her doodled converse, and the door chimes as she leaves. Katherine runs the checks back to her tables, does another round of drinks for a couple of her booths. 

Romanticizing Hawkins...she’s not sure she can do that. But living her life with Hawkins in the background, maybe that’s a perspective shift she needs.

Her birthday is coming up, so it’s as good an opportunity to practice as any. 

She takes the afternoon shift at the diner, and then Josie and Sofia come over later, bringing cupcakes and a candle. They make a late dinner in the small kitchen and then migrate to the living room to watch the latest episode of Magnum PI. Tom Selleck is in the middle of the Pacific, rowing ashore on a paddleboard because the producers know their target audience, when the TV flickers, then shuts off completely. The overhead light does the same.

Sofia gets way excited about having a girl chat by candlelight; Katherine checks that Dad is okay, and by the time she finds a flashlight and is back in the living room, Sofia has found candles that Katherine didn’t even know they had. 

“We need blankets,” Josie says.

“It’s like 86 degrees out, Jo,” Katherine says.

They stare at her and she gets some blankets.

Sofia has the good sense to keep the candles on tables and shelves, and they move the coffee table so they can lie on the floor. Heads close together, feet stretched to the edges of the room, like a human pinwheel. 

“Alright ladies,” Sofia says as they settle. “The real questions. Who goes first?”

“Remington Steele, Tom Magnum, or Angus MacGyver?” Katherine asks, since it’s topical. 

“Magnum, obviously,” Sofia says.

“Good thing you’re going to the west coast,” Josie snickers. “Remington Steele, for me.”

“You just like the accent,” Sofia mutters.

“I think she just has a thing for brunettes,” Katherine teases. 

“No comment,” Josie says. “That leaves Mac for you, Katherine, are you good with that?”

Katherine shrugs. “I’ll accept MacGyver.”

“How gracious of you,” Sofia laughs. “Alright, next—what are we getting famous for?”

They talk until the lights come back on, voices hushing once Katherine’s dad starts snoring in the next room. They plan a hundred ridiculous futures, the lives they’ll have, the dogs they’ll own, muffling their laughter with throw pillows from the couch. They miss the end of the episode, but there’s quiet hugs and birthday wishes as she sends them out.

Katherine closes the door, looking back to the candle-lit living room, blankets strewn about it, thinking that Robin might’ve been onto something. She’s got the room almost back in order when there’s a quiet knock on the door, probably Jo or Sofia left something. 

“Whatever it is, you could’ve picked it up from the diner tomor—oh.” She falters, because it’s not one of the girls. 

“Hey,” Steve says.

“Hi,” Katherine closes the door a little behind her, not wanting to disturb her dad. “Sorry, thought you might be Josie or Sofia; they just left.”

“Oh, good, glad you had people over.”

Katherine frowns. “What?”

“With the, uh, blackout.” Steve flips his head, hair flying, and he shrugs, an extension of it. “That’s why I stopped by, just wanted to check in. 

Katherine leans sideways against the door, crossing her arms in front of her. “You wanted to check in on me after the blackout?”

“On you guys,” Steve amends. “Your dad too. You’re all good?”

“All good,” Katherine says, still not sure why Steve is on her porch; she gestures to his work outfit. “I take it the whole city was down?”

“Yeah, Starcourt went dark for a bit there. On the drive back, I saw some places were waiting on their power to come back, so I thought I’d check that you guys were fine.”

That’s...that’s really sweet.

Of course, their homes are on the same electrical grid, and since his porch light is on, her house is fine too.

Still, it’s very neighborly of him to check in. 

“Yeah, we’re all good,” she says. “Thanks for checking.”

She smiles, and he does too, like it’s a reflex. 

“Cool,” he says.

“Okay, well..goodnight, Steve,” Katherine says, moving to go back into the house.

“Uh, just a sec,” Steve says, on a rush, and he reaches into his back pocket. He comes back with a flat rectangle, something folded inside a 7-eleven plastic bag, sealed with packing tape. “Crap wrapping job, I know.”  
Katherine tilts her head. “What is it?”

He hands it to her, and she takes it automatically. 

“Open it,” Steve says.

Katherine flips over the bag. “If I’m careful with the paper, we can reuse it at Christmas.”

“Shut up,” Steve says, but he looks more excited than annoyed. 

It’s a journal. 

Bound with the softest leather, the color of coffee with cream, with a flap tie closure and a small ‘KRT’ embossed in the bottom right corner. When she opens it, the pages are lightly lined, a thick parchment stock.

“I figured since you don’t have the school paper anymore, you should have a new place to write in,” Steve says quietly. “Do you like it?”

Does she like it?

It’s the prettiest thing she’ll have written in; it’ll stand out against the rows of composition books she has in her room. It’s practical and beautiful, and she realizes she hasn’t said anything when she looks up at Steve and he looks nervous.

“It’s amazing,” Katherine says. “Honestly, it’s amazing, thank you.”

He relaxes, relieved, and a smile splits his face. 

“Good,” he says. “I was worried—”

“No need to worry,” she interrupts. “You win for Best Birthday Present this year.”

Steve blinks. “It’s your birthday?”

Katherine’s jaw drops slightly, surprised. She laughs, covers her mouth, laughs behind it. “Steve...yes. June 28th, every year.”

He makes a face like he’s a little confused, and that’s when it occurs to Katherine then this wasn’t a birthday gift, it’s a ‘just because’ gift. And because she doesn’t know what to say to that, she reaches up and hugs him. She feels him hesitate for a moment, then his arms wrap around her lower back and Katherine smiles into the hideous Scoops Ahoy uniform. He smells like waffle cones and she wasn’t expecting that, but it’s endearing. 

“Thank you,” she mumbles.

“Sure,” Steve says, his voice a little deeper now that she can hear it from his chest. “Happy birthday.”

She smiles. Squeezes him a little tighter, then steps back, looking up at him. “I should head in; I’m letting all the AC out.”

Steve nods. “Yeah, course.”

Katherine smiles again. “Okay. Goodnight. Thanks again.”

Steve backs away a little bit to the edge of the porch. “Night, Kat,” he says. 

Katherine shuts the door, thoughts slow. The journal is pretty, and she has no idea what she’ll fill it with. She brushes her fingers over the top of it, feeling the smooth, soft leather of the cover. It’s only when she gets to the bottom corner when she realizes she doesn’t remember telling him her middle name. 

**July, 1985**

She hears the pounding on the door like it’s a dream, a heavy reverberating noise that makes her teeth hurt. 

“Mr. Tracy? Mr. Tracy, it’s Sofia; can you let us in please?”

The frenzied knocking on the door continues and then there’s the wheels across the floor downstairs, then the abrupt stop of the knocking when her dad answers it. 

Katherine takes a breath, and immediately gasps, pain shooting up her side. She winces, and that makes it worse; her entire face seizes, and the night before comes back to her.

The 4th of July rush was always crazy at Ronnie’s. Everyone had been stocking up before they went to the carnival or out of town for fireworks and she’d barely made it home and into pajamas before she fell fast asleep. 

She’d woken up to a series of hits. At first, she thought someone was in her room, but then she realized the pains were phantom, and her soulmate was back again. It was different this time, methodical, spaced out, and administered from above. He wasn’t fighting back. She felt his eyes swell, his lip burst, his ribs crack, then break, and she’d blacked out.

“Katherine? Kath, are you up there, are you okay?”

Footsteps on the stairs, then her door swings open. 

“Kath, honey—oh my god.”

Katherine opens her eyes, or tries to, but they’re heavy and swollen and the sunlight makes them burn. Sofia is standing over her, and Katherine realizes she’s on the floor by her bed, tangled in the duvet and her sheets. Sofia kneels beside her, grabs a pillow off the bed and lifts her head; the motion is gentle enough but the movement sends the world spinning. 

“Katherine…” Sofia’s voice is thick with worry, and she smooths back Katherine’s hair from her face. “You’re going to be fine.” 

“Yeah, I know,” she says, her voice annoyingly shaky. “Didn’t sleep much.”

“Oh, shit.”

Katherine can’t turn to look at the door of her room, but she doesn’t recognize that voice immediately, and when she does, it doesn’t make any more sense. “Robin?”

“Sofia said to grab you water, so, here.”

Robin has a glass of water in her hand; the glass hovers in the air a good two feet above Katherine, still on the floor.

“Seriously?” Sofia hisses.

Robin purses her lips and sets the glass down on the table. “Right. Uh, what can I do?”

“What are you doing here?” Katherine asks. 

“I ran into her at the diner,” Sofia says quickly. 

Robin looks like she had another answer, but she nods. “Yep, that is correct, that is what happened.”

Katherine’s head is throbbing. It feels like someone stuck a handful of matches down her throat, scraping their way down and ignited in her lungs; she feels every breath. It’s not her pain, but it certainly feels like it.

She looks at Sofia. “Did you tell her?”

Sofia nods. “That your soulmate is a dumbass who seems mostly fine 11 months out of the year, but likes to get absolutely obliterated every now and then, just for some excitement, and you get to wear the results for a couple weeks? Yeah, I told her.”

Katherine laughs in her mind, but the thought of moving is enough to discourage it from reality. “You left out the Brooklyn part.”

“So it would seem, I did. Here, Robin, trade me.” She gestures, and the two switch places. “I’m going to go talk to your dad; I think we startled him when we came in like that.”

Katherine nods, sending the room spinning, but she’s pretty sure she only moves a couple of inches. “Thanks.”

“Robin, get her to drink some water, okay?”

Sofia heads downstairs and Katherine closes her eyes. 

“You wouldn’t have a straw here, would you?” Robin asks.

“Don’t think so,” Katherine says.

“K. How much of this,” Robin reaches for the glass, “do we think you can drink without me spilling the rest of it?”

Turns out, not a lot. 

Sofia comes back, helps them towel off the ¾ cup of water that Robin dumped on Katherine, and they get her up into the bed, explaining the night before—Starcourt exploded, some thirty people died, the FBI are flying in, just to be extra careful. At first, Katherine wonders if her soulmate was there, but the bruises she’s sustaining are definitely from other people, not a wall-melting explosion. She’s not really sure how death factors into the pain-sharing schtick, but she imagines she’d feel something other than sore. She’s mostly fine; as with the last couple of incidents, she’s bruised and exhausted but not actually broken. 

Over the next couple of days, more news trickles in. There’s government arrests, warrants on everyone and everything, no safety net for the people with jobs that dissolved with the mall.

Which explains why Robin’s around so much. 

She and Sofia and Josie seem to be taking shifts checking in.

Unlike during the school year, this time Katherine has the luxury of just sleeping it off; it’s nice to wake up and have a friend nearby. Sofia comes prepped with highly detailed reports of life in Hawkins, Robin reads her macabre Italian excerpts, and Josie brings her syllabi for the fall semester.

Katherine wishes she could talk to him.

First of all, she’d tell him to quit the fight club, or whatever he’s doing. It’s not routine enough to be a schedule, but it’s too frequent (honestly, once would’ve sufficed) to be commonplace. He’s into something, and she doesn’t know what, but she knows it’s bad for him.

She wants to know why.

Maybe he’s a masochist, but if he’s her soulmate, chances are slim. 

She hopes, at least.

But there has to be a reason why he lets himself go through this. She and Sofia joke about Brooklyn, but what if he is in a gang? What if he’s in the police or the military or what if he’s a drug smuggler? Those are really the only options Katherine can think of.

She hopes he doesn’t mind the bruises she left on his hand.

When she’d woken up, when she’d felt everything he did, she couldn’t get to the window. She couldn’t do the usual deep breaths/calming thoughts thing she tries to do when the night terrors struck, and she needed something to focus on, so she took her own hand. She clenched it as hard as she could, felt the metacarpal bones fold over each other, squeezed tighter. It didn’t hurt anything near as bad as the rest of her, and it gave her something to do, something to feel like she’s a part of it.

Katherine looks at her left hand, at the bruises under her thumb, seeping down to around her wrist, the crescent shapes above where her nails dug in. Lighter than the bruises over the rest of her body, blue instead of purple. It’s weird to see a bruise she made; it’s tender when she taps it, and she feels it from the top of her skin down, instead of pushing up from inside her bones.

It’s a weak imitation of holding his hand, but she hopes it helped him, or, at least, that he didn’t mind.

The swelling dies down quicker this time, which is odd. It’s methodical, which makes Josie think he’s in a hospital, but Katherine isn’t sure, since the bruise on her hand stays there. 

It doesn’t stop her from getting back to the diner as soon as she can. 

Robin is at the diner most days, since her last job imploded, but she’s looking for work. 

(Frank says no before either of them ask.)

“I need a favor, Kat,” she calls across in the middle of the morning shift at the diner, and Katherine smiles at Table 3 before coming back to the bar. 

“It couldn’t have waited thirty seconds?”

“Nope,” Robin is shrugging into a jacket, even though it’s in the mid-80s outside. “The Sonic across town is having open interviews in 20.”

“Good luck?” Katherine says, not sure where her favor comes in. 

“Table 3, at the window, Tracy,” Frank calls from the kitchen. 

Robin jerks her chin at the newspaper she’d been reading, folded on the countertop. “Can you run that by Steve’s?”

Katherine looks at the paper, noting the circled job listings in red marker. “I mean, I can, but I’m not done here for another two hours; it’d probably be faster if you took it.”

Robin twists her hair into a bun, secured by said red marker. “In theory, but I have to pick up my brother from soccer camp, so you will be done before me.”

Katherine blinks. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Look, just take the paper to him, will you?”

“Order’s up, Tracy,” Frank calls.

“Sure,” Katherine says quickly, to Frank and Robin, both. 

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Kat,” Robin calls, dashing from the diner as Katherine runs Table 3’s omelletes out to them. 

When she does show up at the Harrington’s, Katherine’s plan is to shove the paper at Steve the moment he answers the door and then sprint over to her house and sit in front of a floor fan for the next hour, but no such luck. 

Mrs. Harrington opens the door, letting out a wave of positively frozen air, and pulling Katherine inside. 

“Katherine! We knew you’d show up eventually,” Mrs. Harrington beams at her. “Come in, come in.”

“Oh, I’m actually just here to drop off—” Katherine begins, but Mrs. Harrington waves a hand. 

“I know Steve wouldn’t reach out and ask you to visit, but between you and me, I think he’s ready for visitors over the age of 13.” 

Katherine frowns. “The party’s been over?”

Mrs. Harrington nods, sighing. “Do you know why they call themselves that?”

Katherine shakes her head. 

“Ah well,” Mrs. Harrington says, heading down the hall towards the living room. “Anyways, Steve is upstairs; you can go up, it’s on the right—well, you know where his room is.”

Katherine lifts her hair off her neck, waiting for her body to adjust from the humidity to the dry cold. “That’s okay, I can wait for him down here.” 

Mrs. Harrington stops in her path to the living room; when she turns back to Katherine, her expression is confused. 

“Katherine...you have spoken to Steve since the Fourth, haven’t you?”

Katherine shakes her head, wondering if there’s a socially acceptable way to say ‘actually my soulmate decided to pick that night to have the snot kicked out of him, so I haven’t spoken to much of anybody since then,’ and coming up blank. 

“I actually haven’t,” she says aloud. “We’ve been dealing with a family emergency.”

Mrs. Harrington looks a little pacified by that, but she still looks slightly troubled. She purses her lips, and comes over on timid steps.

“He’s been in the hospital, Katherine,” she says slowly, carefully. “I thought surely you knew.”

Katherine’s throat feels dry, suddenly. He’s been in the hospital? With what, for how long, what happened, why didn’t anyone tell her—Mrs. Harrington sees the questions race across her face and inclines her head towards the stairs, telling her to go up. 

Katherine does. 

Unlike the downstairs, which has been renovated and kept current, the upstairs is exactly how Katherine remembers it being when they were kids. She reaches the top of the stairs, and pauses outside Steve’s door.

This is...weird.

He was in the hospital and nobody told her? Sure, they don’t run in similar circles, but apparently the Will Byers support group knew, which means Nancy knows, so Nancy could have told her. And Robin, she must’ve known too, so why didn’t Robin tell? 

The door is open a bit, and Katherine can see into the room. 

Steve’s asleep on the bed— on his stomach, his hair splayed everywhere, face pressed into the pillow. She should knock, but she doesn’t know that she wants him to wake up. She pushes the door a little bit, and when it doesn’t creak and he doesn’t stir, Katherine steps into the room. She tilts her head, looking at the man on the bed. The air and blankets seem normal, so it’s not a fever, there’s no IV, so it’s not an infection. Some other kind of surgery, or an accident, something hidden under the comforter and in the high noon shadows of the room. Katherine’s mind is whirring, she’s missing something and it’s something obvious and she’s smarter than this, she should be able to tell—

His hand. 

His left hand is dangling off the edge of the bed, poking out from the end of his comforter. It’s just his hand, how it always looks, normal and Steve, but there’s marks on it, light blue circles and crescent moon nail marks above them, where someone had held tight, so tight, tight enough to bruise.

Katherine sits, hard. 

Her legs find the thick carpet and cross under her as she stares at that hand. 

Steve?

Steve is her soulmate. He’s the one who’s breaking ribs and getting his head kicked in, and honestly it’s a miracle his nose has healed as well as it has, three times over, now. The more she thinks about it, the more it slides into place—all the times he and Nancy and Jonathan went missing, coinciding with new injuries on her own skin—but the less it makes sense. 

Does he know? 

Katherine looks up from the hand to the face on the pillow, forehead crinkled in sleep. Does he know it’s her?

Surely, he can’t.

He was in love with Nancy a year ago, and besides, how would he know? Every time she’s shown signs, he’s been incapacitated. 

Katherine runs a hand through her hair. 

It feels surreal. 

What is he doing, what’s it for? 

Mrs. Harrington said the party was here, and given the Nancy/Jonathan/Steve dynamic, it fits that it’s something weird that the kids got messed up in and he stepped in between—and, oh my god, is he even okay? Katherine’s known her soulmate for all of three minutes, and she’s already messed it up thinking about logistics and not the fact that every time she’s been debilitated, he’s actually borne the blows. 

Katherine presses her hands over her forehead. 

How is she supposed to process this?

She’s just gotten used to having him as a friend, but as more than that? As her person? The soulmate thing is complicated—most people don’t come across theirs, and make their relationships work with commitment and compromise, the American way. It works for most everyone, and there are too many stories of unhealthy soulmates—people who expect their relationship to work just because you share pain. Then there’s the platonic soulmates, people that really are better as friends, or who meet after one of them is in a committed relationship.

Katherine looks up at the bed, a thought curling in her mind. 

If Steve doesn’t know, it’s up to her how far he can go. 

She can tell him, they can figure out what they want to do...but if she does that, then a part of him is going to feel like he’s leaving her if he leaves Hawkins. And if anyone can break away from Hawkins, it’s King Steve.

He can’t know. 

If he knows, he’ll never leave. 

She might not love him like a soulmate, she might have a hard time understanding any of this, but this much she knows—she’s not so selfish as to ask someone to stay in Hawkins who doesn’t need to. She wouldn’t ask it of Sofia or Josie, even Robin or Nancy, and definitely not Steve. 

She leaves the newspaper on his desk, writes a note that she stopped by, didn’t want to wake him, and to give her a call if he wants. 

She pauses at the door. 

Katherine looks at the sun filtering into the room, shadows dancing on a favorite son, and thinks that maybe that’s what being a soulmate is about after all—being the person there to look over them, squeeze their hand, and make the decision to let them go. 

**August, 1985**

Nancy comes back to the diner as soon as school starts. 

It tracks, because her boyfriend graduated and she knows all of Katherine’s friends will be migrating to college as the month goes on. 

As far as Katherine can tell, the internship was eventful enough. She doesn’t ask about Starcourt because she doesn’t want to open that door, and since Nancy is a month away from being her only friend who’s local, she doesn’t want to risk alienation. 

So, she brings bottles of soda to the counter and turns semicolons into periods in Nancy’s drafts of the school paper. 

“Would you ever go to Comic con?” Nancy asks, running her tongue over her teeth at the sugar content of her Sprite. 

Katherine whacks a roll of coins, breaking them open into the register. “What for?”

Nancy shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s something my brother and his friends would be into, but I wonder if there’s something like that for people that aren’t nerds.”

“We call them press conferences,” Katherine says.

“I guess so,” Nancy tilts her head. “Still. Can you believe something like that would run for eighteen years?”

Katherine rearranges the nickels in their tub. “People like being passionate about inconsequential things.”

“That’s almost profound, Kat.”  
“Almost,” Katherine looks up, smiles. “What’s the angle this week?”

Nancy sighs, rearranging the papers in front of her. “I’ll let you know when I do.”

Katherine looks back to the kitchen to make sure her plates aren’t out yet, before she whacks open a roll of quarters.

She looks at her hand over the change drawer, the bruises faded to little crescent scars on her left hand. Steve called when he got her note, explained he’d been working a late shift at Starcourt (which was crap, but she let it go), and thanked her for dropping off the paper; other than that, they haven’t really talked.

She can’t decide if not telling him what she knows is dishonest or not.

He hasn’t asked, so she’s not lying, and that has to be worth something. 

“Order, Tracy,” Frank calls.

Katherine closes the register door and throws the paper coin wrappers in the trash can in the kitchen, grabbing the plates on her way back out. She hears the bells above the doors chime, and she’s not surprised to see Nancy isn’t alone at the bar when she gets back to it.

“Mr. Henderson,” she greets as she comes back around the counter.   
“Miss Tracy,” Dustin chirps, and Nancy makes a face. 

Katherine empties the ketchup bottles out of her apron. “What’s up? How’s seventh grade?”

“Eighth,” Nancy whispers.

“Eighth grade,” Katherine coughs. “Like I said.”

“It’s fine,” Dustin says, unbothered. “We’re back to US history which sucks.”

“I feel that,” Nancy mutters.

“Why’s that?” Katherine asks, at the same time.

“We don’t have samurais,” Dustin shrugs. 

That’s fair, Katherine thinks. 

Dustin drops a couple quarters on the counter. “Can I have a coke?”

While Katherine scoops some ice into a glass and takes it over to the fountain, Nancy picks up conversation, asking about Suzie. Katherine slips out to check on her tables, and when she comes back to the conversation, she catches the end of Dustin’s sentence. 

“...and I don’t think the radios go that far.”

“How far?” she asks, coming back around the counter.

“Bloomington,” Dustin says. “And even if they do, I’ve heard the dormitories are really bad for reception.”

Katherine nods, pulling a basin of silverware out from the counter, stacking the napkins next to them on the counter so she can begin rolling. “I’m sure you guys will figure it out; you’ve got a couple of years before the party has to head off to college.”

“What?” Dustin asks. 

Katherine settles a fork, spoon, and knife inside of a diagonal napkin. “What?”

“I mean, yeah,” Dustin takes his hat off and resettles it on his head, confused. “There’s a couple years left for us, but Steve leaves this Sunday.”

Katherine looks up from the silverware; Nancy and Dustin look back at her.

“Steve is going to IU?” Katherine asks.

Dustin looks at Nancy, then pulls the coke closer to him, lowering his head to take a drink and avoiding eye contact. 

Nancy nods.

Katherine wants to say something pithy, but she’s speechless. She goes back to the silverware, folding carefully, busying her hands. 

So he’s doing it, getting out of Hawkins. 

Good for him. 

It’d be a hell of a lot easier to cheer for him if it hadn’t been a secret. 

Nancy takes the hint and starts asking Dustin what his ideal panel lineup would be, if he ever got to go to Comic Con, and Katherine continues with the silverware in silence. 

This is fine, she thinks.

Honestly, it’s better than fine, it’s good.

He’s supposed to leave, supposed to go. He never told her why he stayed for the summer, and given that she hadn’t heard about this sooner, it was a recent decision.

What a month for life-changing revelations. 

She reaches for a spoon and the basin is empty; that’s all the cutlery. Dustin and Nancy don’t stick around too long, and the rest of her shift blurs by. She blinks, and she’s home, not necessarily a good thing because zoning out while driving is more than a little unsafe, but she’s in one piece, so she decides to reserve judgment for another time. 

For now, there’s a rhythmic pounding, and Katherine looks over to see Steve shooting hoops in the basket in his driveway, illuminated by his car’s headlights. 

She doesn’t mean to slam her car door as she gets out, but it slams anyways, and Steve looks up at the sound. 

He misses the shot.

He jogs over to get the rebound, shoots and makes it, catches the ball and looks over at her as she walks over. 

“Kat,” he says, breathing slightly labored from exertion. He flips his head, hair flying out of his face. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. She makes a gesture for him to carry on and crosses in front of one of the headlights to lean against the hood of his car in between them. Steve considers her for a moment then starts again. He moves around the driveway quickly, years of practice evident in the automation with which he moves to different points and lines up his shots. 

Katherine pulls up one of her feet to the bumper, crossing her arm on her knee and leaning her chin on her arm. She’s not certain why she’s here, or why she’s mad, but now that she’s here she’s short on words. 

Steve catches the ball under the net and looks back at her, then dribbles the ball instead of shooting it again. 

“Who told you?” he asks, quietly.

“Dustin,” Katherine says. 

Steve nods.

When he doesn’t say anything else, Katherine prods, “He shouldn’t have had to.”

Steve’s eyebrows lift and drop, the ball alternating between hands on its journey to and from the ground. “Probably not. I...I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

Katherine rolls her chin on her arm. “An attempt would’ve been a good start.”

“Yeah, how would that have gone,” Steve grabs the ball midair. “Hey, Kat, you know how you hate Hawkins and everyone else is leaving, guess what, I’m leaving you too.”

She frowns. “I don’t think people are leaving _me_ , Steve, they’re just leaving.”

Steve’s jaw clenches, and he lets the ball go again. “Okay,” he says, noncommittal. 

Katherine waits, but he doesn’t look up from the dribbling. 

“Okay?” she pushes. “Seriously, that’s what you’ve got?”

Steve catches the ball, rests it on his hip, arm draped over the side of it. “I’m going to Indiana University,” he says, and Katherine notices he’s focusing on her hairline, still not looking at her. “They hold acceptance open till the start of classes so after the Fourth of Jul—the Starcourt thing, I decided I should head out.”

Katherine feels bad, for a moment. A lot happens in this town, specifically to Steve, specifically dangerous; it makes sense that he wants out. 

“Autumns haven’t been great in Hawkins, for you,” she says.

Steve’s eyes drop, looking at her. “What do you mean?”

That’s when you get beat up, you idiot, she thinks.

“Uh, just that that’s when things seem to go down, or you’d miss class or something.”

Steve nods. “Right.” 

He drops the ball, the sound echoing as it resumes its rhythm. 

“What are you studying?” she asks.

“Dunno,” he says. “I don’t have to decide until January.”

“Cool.” Katherine watches him for a moment. “Were you going to just leave? Without telling me?”

Steve turns, back to the hoop and the routine of practice. He does a couple layups, moving around the driveway; for a few moments, there’s just the sound of the ball on the concrete, the backboard, the net. 

“Thought it might be easier,” Steve says, finally. 

Katherine frowns at his back. Why would that be easier?

He catches the ball as it bounces off the backboard and doesn’t line up another shot. His shoulders are moving slightly from the running, and Katherine wishes she understood.

“You thought that I wouldn’t—” she asks. 

“No,” he interrupts, turning suddenly. “For me. I thought it would be easier for me to just go.”

Katherine blinks.

Of course it’s not about her. Steve is trying to be a good friend and not remind her of the fact that he doesn’t have to stay here, trying to spare her that feeling of everyone else leaving. She let the soulmate thing get in her head, and he’s just trying to make something as uneventful as possible.

And here she is being offended that he didn’t personally tell her his life plan.

Katherine drops her foot from the bumper. “Sorry,” she says, quietly.

“Wait, why are you sorry?” Steve asks, looking genuinely confused. 

“It’s not about me,” Katherine shrugs. “I’m glad you figured out the fall, Steve. I’m sure you’ll do great at college.”

“Kat, that—” Steve breaks off, sliding a hand over his face. “That’s not what I meant.”

Maybe it isn’t, but it’s what she needed to hear anyways. 

She pushes off the bumper. “It’s okay. I...um, I’ll see you around.”

It sounds lame, but she doesn’t know what else to say. She crosses in front of the headlights, walking back over to her house.

“Hey, hey, wait,” Steve calls, jogging around her to block her path. He ducks his shoulders a bit to try to meet her eyes, and Katherine backs up a little bit. 

“Um,” Steve says, like he’s surprised that this is where they are too, “Are you, I don’t know, okay?”

She’s grateful for the shadows now that they’re out of the headlights.

“I’m good, yeah,” Katherine says. It’s not 100% the truth, but it’s certainly better than ‘as good as I can be, knowing that I’m a pretty dang selfish soulmate, and I should be really happy you’re getting to leave and have a shot at a future, and instead I’m disappointed you didn’t tell me about it even though you have no way of knowing you should’ve.’ 

“Okay,” Steve says, uncertainly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you; I should’ve.”  
Katherine shakes her head, smiling so he can see even in the shadows. “It’s really okay. I don’t know why I expected to be told. It’s not like…” she trails off. 

“Not like what?” Steve asks.

Like you know we’re soulmates and are choosing to leave on purpose, Katherine thinks. 

“Like you owed me an explanation,” she says. 

“Oh,” Steve says, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say he sounded disappointed. 

Katherine tugs at her ponytail. “I’m going to go, Steve.”

Neither of them move, and Katherine thinks it’s almost funny that this is the closest they’ve been in a while but there’s a lot she’s not saying. 

Him either.

After a moment, he nods slowly, hair bobbing, and steps aside. “Sure,” he says, quiet. “Have a good night. Uh, sorry. Again.”

“It’s okay, Steve,” Katherine says, smiles bright, and walks back to her house. She decides not to look back, not certain what she’d find, but positive that she doesn’t want to see Steve’s look of pity.

Sunday morning, she’s on the floor of the living room, pretending to watch I Love Lucy reruns with Dad. She’d told him about Steve leaving, not her reaction and certainly about the soulmate thing, but he knows her well enough that she’s listening for the sound of an engine turning over.

Over the laugh track, she hears it, and Katherine purses her lips. 

It’s fine. 

Leaving is what he’s supposed to do, it makes sense.

“Katherine…” her dad says, voice telling. 

Damn it, he’s right. 

“I know,” she mutters, and she pushes to her feet, running for the door. 

Steve’s halfway out of the driveway when she makes it outside, but when he sees her, he lets off the clutch and the car dies. She motions to him. 

“Get out,” she says; Steve yanks the keys, and climbs out of the car. 

“Kat, are you okay, what’s —”

She hugs him as soon as he’s free of the car. Just winds her arms around his waist, closes her eyes against his chest, and reminds herself that this is for him, that’s why this matters. The man holding her carefully, confused, he has to get out of here. 

It’s the right thing to do, she knows it, and she’ll be fine once he’s cleared the city.

He’s patting her back, uncertain, trying to be comforting and not knowing what for, and that’s what sets her off. 

She doesn’t mean to start crying. 

It just hits her, all of the things she’s not supposed to be feeling. The uncertainty about either of their futures, the stool at Ronnie’s that’s going to be perpetually empty, the fact that the next time he gets hit, she’s going to know it’s him, but he’s going to be hours away. 

He makes a little panicked sound when he realizes she’s crying. 

“Wait, Kat, are you—”

“I’m fine,” she says, muffled into the front of his shirt. “It’s fine.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he does pull her a little tighter, which doesn’t help. 

Katherine clenches her eyes shut, listens to the beat of his heart through his chest.

His ridiculous heart, she thinks.

The reason he did whatever he did for the party, the thing that’s kept him in Hawkins as long as he’s stayed, to make sure everyone else is okay. The reason he got out of his car to let his crazy neighbor hug him, no explanation. 

She smiles, pulling back a little bit to look up at him. 

He’s going to be okay, and she’s going to make sure of it; it’s what soulmates are for. 

“I’m going to miss you,” she says. 

Steve looks down, and his eyebrows scrunch a bit. “You too,” he says.

She wonders if she should tell him. 

But that time was last month, this month, even in his driveway earlier this week...but not today, not when he’s on his way already. It’d be unfair, and she won’t.

So she doesn’t say anything, just stays close, and gives herself another moment. 

It passes.

She loosens her arms, steps back, crosses her arms in front of her. “Drive safe,” she says.

Steve’s arms are loose by his side, a little unsure. He opens his mouth to say something, then stops himself; his mouth snaps shut. He reaches out and brushes her hair behind her ear; she can’t read his expression, but there’s something, a lot of something behind his eyes. 

He drops his hand. 

“I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, yeah?”

Katherine thinks about how holidays are extra busy at the diner, but she smiles bright and nods. “Of course. Bring me back a Hoosiers baseball hat or something.”

Steve laughs, tucking his hands into his vest pockets. “Sure.”

She looks at him, in the early morning sunlight, flannel and a vest, looking down at her. 

A bee lands right below his elbow. 

He moves to swat it away, but it doesn’t fly and it stings him; Katherine feels the sharp prick on her forearm and brushes it reflexively. 

“Ow,” she mutters. 

Steve flicks the bug away, shaking out his arm, but then he stops, registering. “Wait, what did you—”

Shit, Katherine thinks, the surrealness of the moment evaporating. 

“Um, what?” she says quickly, pulling her arm behind her back, clears her throat.

Steve’s fingers curl off his arm, staring at the red welt intently, then back at her. 

“You said ‘ow’,” he says.

Katherine’s mind is racing; Steve just found out they’re soulmates. 

“Did I?” she says, wondering how long she can keep up the playing dumb angle.

“You did,” Steve says. “You...you felt that.”

He’s not asking, he’s just confirming, so Katherine nods.

“Um, yeah,” she says, keeping her voice calm. “Sorry, I was just surprised.”

“Surprised,” Steve echoes; his voice seems slow. “Surprised like...how?”

“Like, very,” Katherine says, mind scrambling.

“Well, yeah, but like good or bad surprised?” Steve asks.

“Like surprised, I don’t know,” Katherine says, exasperated.

Steve is watching her closely, his eyes intense.

She doesn’t know what he’s looking at her for. Does he not believe that she doesn’t know? Is he trying to reconcile the image of her with his soulmate? Is that really so hard to do?

Katherine frowns. “Speaking of surprised, you don’t seem very. Did you know?”  
“Course not,” Steve says quickly, looking away. 

Katherine tries, she really does, not to be offended by the unspoken ‘literally how would I know, or why would I even think that?’.

And really, how would he. 

She tries not to read into anything else...the fact that he didn’t know, that he’s not looking at her anymore, the fact that he hasn’t seem surprised or really any type of way other than curious for her reaction. 

She’d kind of thought that when she met her soulmate, he’d have a little more to say. She doesn’t love the thought of being a disappointment. 

Steve clears his throat. “We can be friends.”

She looks up, sharp. “What?”

“Yeah,” he says, voice determined. “It’s better that way, you know, and you don’t have to worry about...anything.” 

His voice sounds off, like he’s trying to convince himself, and Katherine feels her cheeks heat.

Of course. 

Friends is the only option, she’s known that all along, but the fact that he jumped straight to it, like he wouldn’t consider anything else. Like being something, anything, more to her just isn’t even a choice worth considering. 

Better that way, he’d said. 

Better than any alternative, he’d meant.

“Right,” she says, quickly. “Friends, of course.” 

“Okay,” Steve says. “I mean, I’m leaving; I wouldn’t want you to feel like—”

“You should go, Steve,” Katherine says. She hadn’t meant to interrupt him, but the thought of hearing him justify this runabout was actually awful. 

He stops short. “What?”

“Yeah,” she nods. “You’ve got a long drive.”

He looks at her. “It’s like two hours.”

“And you’re burning daylight,” Katherine says, and it sounds harsh, but she doesn’t want to stand here and deal with the fact that the one person, Steve or not, that’s supposed to be her person, is adamant about being friends.

He stares at her, then looks down at the car, his hand through his hair again. “Okay, sure. Yeah.”

She doesn’t say anything, steps back from the car, so he has plenty of room. 

Steve’s jaw tightens. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, right?”  
“Right,” she says, knowing she’ll schedule shifts around the clock, be busy whenever he’s in town. 

“Okay,” he says. 

He looks for a moment like he wants to say something else, or maybe do something else, but he doesn’t. Just nods and climbs back into the car; Katherine doesn’t wait for the car to start, walking back into her house and ignoring when the I Love Lucy studio audience roars with laughter at her life.

**September, 1985**

September is quiet. 

In a way, it feels like summer hasn’t ended, like she’s just keeping her holiday hours and things will go back to normal when she goes back to school. But, of course, school has started and she’s just not attending. 

The wind blows a little cooler, scarves come out, and auburn leaves dance down from trees; disastrously kitschy cornucopias start popping up on front stoops.

Katherine ends up in the old town library one weekend, after her shift, looking through French/English dictionaries. She’s wondering if Robin could drop her off in Cannes on her way to Florence, when she hears her name whispered through the stacks, and looks over to see Nancy waving, and speed walking over.

It’s a vaguely threatening sight.

Part of Katherine wonders if she doesn’t move, if Nancy’ll just plow straight through her. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t come to that, but Katherine shifts her line-by-line translation of the Count of Monte Cristo to rest on her hip along with her dictionary and waits.

“Thank Christ,” Nancy stage whispers, once she’s within stage whispering range. “I need a cider buddy.”

“A what?”

“Kinkos has another hundred copies of the paper to print,” Nancy says, waving a hand across the street to indicate the printer store. “And I want to try the cider at the coffee shop across the street, because it’s that kind of day.”

Katherine looks where she’s pointing, to the gray sky and brown leaves blowing down the street.

It _is_ an awfully gray kind of day.

“God,” Nancy says unhappily. “Doesn’t it just make you want to open a vein?”

“Inappropriate,” Katherine says. “So inappropriate.”

But then Nancy’s looking at her hopefully, and she sighs. 

“Let me get these checked out,” she says, wielding her books in self-defense. “Then we can go.”

Nancy’s shoulders relax, and she grins.

“Yes!” she cheers—as much as anyone can cheer in a whisper—and it somehow doesn’t sound entirely sarcastic. “Hooray for autumnal festivity.”

Ten minutes later, they’re nestled in overstuffed chairs in the window of the only coffee shop in downtown Hawkins, mugs of boiling cider balanced on their knees, which strikes Katherine as sort of half-heartedly tempting fate, but the air outside is just so _cold._

“Have you ever been apple picking?” Nancy asks, blowing at the steam coming off her mug.

“I haven’t,” Katherine says. “I’m not sure what I would do with extra apples.”

Nancy sets the mug on the table, content to let it cool before risking another sip, and considering the bear claw donut she’d also ordered without any real interest.

“That’s fair. My mother likes to make apple pies, but Dad’s the only one who ever eats it.” Nancy picks at the bear claw, frowns. “That sounds a little un-American, doesn’t it?”

Katherine shrugs, looking at her own mug with more than a little suspicion.

“It’s definitely un-‘autumnal festivity’,” she allows, and Nancy shrugs.

“Oh, well,” she says, and waits until Katherine’s got a careful mouthful of the piping-hot liquid before she asks, “Have you talked to Steve recently?”

Katherine doesn’t choke, but that’s less a conscious decision and more a stroke of divine intervention.

“That was a heck of a transition, Nancy,” she manages, once she’s out of the danger zone.

Nancy raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything, just tears into her donut with a sort of determined ferocity.

Katherine gets the uncomfortable feeling that Nancy will just sit there and let her stew in silence until she answers, so she’d better just get it over with.

“I haven’t, no,” she admits, and tries to make it sound casual. “Not since he left.”

Not that she was expecting him to call or anything.

She wasn’t.

Nancy hums.

Katherine waits, but Nancy seems inclined to do the same, so Katherine mentally sighs and takes the bait.

“Why?” she asks. “Should I have?”

Nancy pops a piece of the donut into her mouth, tilting her head and chewing thoughtfully.

“I mean, yeah,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Definitely.”

Katherine doesn’t know what she was expecting, but that bluntness wasn’t it. “Why?”

“I’m a journalist, Kat,” Nancy says, wiping her hand on a napkin, and then makes a face. “Or at least, I want to be. I know Steve’s your soulmate.”

This time, Katherine nearly drops her mug. “Um—”

Nancy just watches her, unimpressed.

“It’s not my business,” she says, in a tone that implies she wants to be having this conversation about as much as Katherine does. “Not really. Not anymore.”

“How did you—”

“What, how did I know?” Nancy looks offended for a second, and then she shrugs. “Does that matter?”

Katherine tries to match her nonchalant tone and probably doesn’t manage it quite as well. “I guess not.”

“Well, then,” Nancy says. “He knows, too. Did you know that?”

Katherine doesn’t answer.

She knows he knows, but she also knows that as soon as he knew, he drove out of town.

Apparently Nancy takes her stunned silence as a confirmation, because she picks up her mug again, studies it like she’s searching for an answer.

“He’s probably being sad in Bloomington as we speak, thinking about how you don’t want him. So, what you—”

“Wait, hold on,” Katherine finally manages to interrupt, and Nancy doesn’t lift her eyes off her mug.

A million thoughts race through her mind. He knew before he left? Why would he still leave, why didn’t he tell her...

It suddenly occurs to her that she’s sitting across from his ex.

“Nancy,” she says carefully. “I hope it goes without saying, but you were really good for him, and I never—”

“Oh, God, no, that’s not what I’m here for,” Nancy says, looking genuinely panicked at the thought. “I mean, I know _now,_ but I didn’t when he and I were together, and he definitely didn’t, so you don’t have anything to worry about there.”

Well, that’s a small relief, Katherine thinks.

She plays Nancy’s words back and frowns.

“What _are_ you here for, then?” Katherine asks, and then she looks at the mugs of cider, the half-eaten donut, and is only half kidding when she asks, “Is this an intervention?”

Nancy has the good grace to look a little guilty at that, so Katherine guesses that’s her answer.

“I mean, an intervention implies some level of planning,” the younger girl grumbles, and takes a careful sip of her cider. “Oh, wait, this is amazing.”

“That’s good,” Katherine says faintly, just as a reflex, and only manages to stop herself from saying ‘I’ll be sure to let the guys in the kitchen know!’ through sheer force of will.

“Right,” Nancy shakes her head, refocuses. “Sorry. Okay, so the reason I wanted to talk to you...”

She trails off in the middle of her thought, has to take a moment to gather her words about her again, and then finally sets her mug back on the table and looks Katherine straight in the eye.

“I really did a number on him,” she says, blunt and honest and almost unapologetic, so that the words cut Katherine straight to the core. “I didn’t mean to. We were both a lot younger than we are now. But still.”

Katherine bites back that it’s almost been two years, but she guesses that there’s a lot more that Steve and Nancy haven’t told her about November and November and the Fourth of July.

She wonders if Nancy was there, the first time Steve nearly got beaten half to death.

She wonders, if she asked, what the other girl would say if she asked for an explanation.

She doesn’t ask.

Instead, she says, “Well, that’s what first relationships are for, right?”

“Maybe,” Nancy says, unconvinced. “Anyways. Robin did too. Probably also unintentionally, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? I mean, if we’re being honest?”

“Sure,” Katherine says weakly, without any real idea of what they’re talking about.

“Not like I can be mad at her,” Nancy admits with a wry smile that’s only just on this side of cruel. “She may have broken his heart, but I broke it first. I think that counts for extra points.”

She throws it out like a challenge, like she’s waiting for Katherine to tell her she’s horrible or call her a bitch or something and leave.

But Katherine just looks at her, and Nancy deflates just a little, softens by degrees.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says into her mug. “I didn’t—”

Katherine still doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t really know what there is to say.

“And so now—” Again, Nancy has to take a moment, and Katherine can practically see her picking out the right words, lining them up like a general sending out her troops. “I’m not sure that Steve thinks he can reach for anything he wants, and his game plan is just to minimize impact.”

Katherine stares. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Which part?” Nancy asks.

Fair point, Katherine thinks, because that was kind of a lot.

“I didn’t know about Robin,” she says, and Nancy shrugs.

“There’s nothing to know,” she says, wipes away a few drops of cider that have spilled down the side of the mug. “Which is kind of the point.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He’s a good guy,” Nancy says carefully. “Now, at least. And the last two people he wanted didn’t want him back.”

She says it the way she says everything else, blunt and simple and straight to the point, but hearing it put so plainly makes something in Katherine’s chest feel like someone’s just wrapped a hand around her heart and squeezed.

“So then you come along,” Nancy continues. “And then he finds out you’re soulmates, and he knows his track record, and also he now knows who’s getting hurt when he gets hurt, so he peaces out.”

Katherine licks her lips.

There’s a whole lot to get into, there, but she figures she might as well start with the part she can actually address.

“Okay,” she says. “But he’s not interested in me like that.”

Now it’s Nancy’s turn to just look at her.

“He’s not,” Katherine says. “Seriously, Nancy, as soon as he found out I knew, he jumped straight into a Let’s Be Friends spiel.”

“Of course he did,” Nancy scoffs. “What else is he supposed to do?”

Katherine blinks. “I don’t know, talk about it?”

Nancy rolls her eyes.

“Why, so he can risk another person telling him ‘thanks, but no thanks’?” she takes another sip of her cider that feels way more pointed than it should. “No way.”

Katherine sits back. “Okay.”

“Not okay,” Nancy insists. “You have to call him and sort this out.”

“Absolutely not.” Katherine shakes her head. “He got out of Hawkins, if he knows that I know, he’s going to come back.”

“Hello, it’s me,” Nancy says, and waves. “The person at the table who is also still in Hawkins.”

Katherine grimaces. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. We live here, we’re allowed to hate it.” Nancy runs her thumb around the rim of her mug and sighs loudly. “Look, you should really reach out to him. To talk about this or not, but he’s going to be all mopey that he hasn’t heard from you at all.”

Katherine frowns. “He should’ve told me.”

Nancy makes a ‘no kidding’ face. “To be fair, you could’ve told him, too.”

“Yeah,” Katherine says. “But I didn’t leave.”

It comes out a little too plaintive for her liking, and Nancy must hear it, too, because she frowns, lowers her mug so it’s resting on her knees once more.

“Steve’s a romantic,” she says, and doesn’t meet Katherine’s gaze. “I told you, I broke his heart first. But you could break his heart worse than anyone else. How many points do you think that’s worth?”

It isn’t an apology, and it isn’t a warning.

It’s just a statement of how things are.

Katherine doesn’t know what to say, so she figures she should just play it safe and not say anything at all.

Nancy lets the moment hang for a few more seconds, and then she waves a hand, like she’s clearing the air between them.

“The radios don’t reach the dorms,” she says, like that’s a totally natural follow-on from her previous remark, and fishes a slip of paper out of her bag, slides it across the table. “Mike got this from Dustin.”

Katherine picks the paper up on autopilot, looks at it for a few seconds before she really understands what she’s seeing.

A phone number.

“It’s his dorm,” Nancy says, studying her bear claw with renewed fascination. “You should really call him.”

Katherine stares at Nancy suspiciously.

“This was totally an intervention,” she mumbles.

Nancy scoffs again.

“Don’t think of it as an intervention,” she says. “Think of it as—uncomfortable advice. But with a side of fall cheer.”

That about sums it up, Katherine supposes.

Nancy drains the rest of her cider in one go, sets the mug down on the table with a determined clink.

“Kinkos should be done,” she says, and swipes her hands against her skirt before leaving. “I’m going to go check.”

Katherine nods, unable to shake the feeling that she’s just been pulled through the looking glass, shaken like a whiplashed baby, and tossed back through again.

Distantly, she thinks that her mental similes get a little morbid when she’s in shock.

“Cool,” Nancy says. “One more bit of advice, then?”

“I’m all ears,” Katherine says, and the other girl scowls, casts one more look at the windy day outside.

“Sort this shit out,” she says. “It’s getting ridiculous, and I’m sick of watching both of you mope.”

Then she turns and marches out the door, and Katherine’s left sitting there, clutching her mug in both hands and trying not to laugh.

She should go home.

She thinks it, then continues to sit, and then the cider’s cold and she’s still sitting there, and she reasons that if she goes home, there’s no way for her to have this conversation without Dad hearing, so she probably shouldn’t do that.

There’s a payphone on the corner, in the middle of the gray, windy intersection, but it’s good to put a time cap

on these things anyways, and she has some change. She hasn’t used one of them in ages, but she slips a quarter into the pay phone and dials the number Nancy gave her. 

It rings three times, then the line picks up. 

“Rob’s Mortuary,” sings a voice, a guy’s, probably around Katherine’s age, “You stab ‘em, we’ll bag ‘em!’”

Katherine isn’t sure what she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. 

“Jesus,” she says. “Seriously?”  
“Oh, shit, you’re not a res,” says the voice. “Uh, sorry. Briscoe Dormitory, Rob speaking.”

“Hi, Rob,” Katherine responds unhelpfully. At Sofia’s dorm, the girls have lines in their room, and at Josie’s the front desk will just page them down; she wonders which is true for Briscoe. “I’m calling for Steve Harrington?”

“No shit!” Rob crows, and Katherine can hear him moving the phone away from his ear as he yells, “Crowder, you owe me ten bucks!”

Katherine hears a response being yelled back, but she can’t make it out. “Look,” she tries. “If you could just—”

“Right, no worries, ma’am, I’ll transfer you right away!”

The line goes quiet for a moment, then it rings again and another voice picks up. 

“Crowder’s Roadside Diner—you kill ‘em, we’ll grill ‘em—who is this?”

Katherine pinches the bridge of her nose. “What? No, who’s this?”

“Cam Crowder, and if you’re Harrington’s girl then I owe Rob $10.”

And really, what is she supposed to say to that? 

“I’ll let you know when I know, how’s that, Cam? Now can I—”

“Suck it, Rob,” Cam shouts, and Katherine pulls the phone from her ear at the volume as he continues to yell. “She says it’s not official!”

There’s a clicking on the line and then Rob scrambles back on. “What? Are you sure?”

“Are you being paid for this?” Katherine asks, because Josie is already trying to be an RA in her dorm next fall, and the application process starts in October, but she’s not getting the same overachiever energy from Cam and Rob. 

“Oh absolutely not,” Cam says, cheerily. 

“Yeah, no,” Rob cuts in. “We do this out of the charity in our souls.”

Katherine’s disappointed in herself for wondering.

“Can we maybe harness some of that charity into getting Steve on the line?” she asks. 

“Eh, sure,” Rob says. “Hey, Trey, c’mere!”

Katherine’s nearly certain they can page the room to have Steve come down, instead of just increasing the game of telephone.

No pun intended. 

“Really,” she says. “If you can just let him kno—”

“Trey’s Crematorium,” another voice on the line, “you ghost ‘em, we’ll roast ‘em.”

Katherine gives up. 

“Hi, Trey,” she says.

“Hi,” he says, then a pause. “Sorry, I don’t know why the guys pulled me on the phone.”

That’s two of us, Katherine thinks.

“Steve Harrington around?”

“Shit, are you Kat?”

Katherine blinks. “Do I want to know how you know that?”

“Steve’s my roommate,” says Trey. “Crowder, you owe Rob a Hamilton.”

“I’ll pay when Steve confirms,” Cam retorts, and Katherine can practically hear the shrug on his voice.

“Hey,” she tries again, “Speaking of Steve?”

“Yeah, I’ll get him,” Trey says, and there’s a yelp from one of the other guys as they scramble to catch the phone.

“Thanks,” Katherine says, and the line goes quiet. 

Well, mostly quiet. 

Someone’s humming Mr Roboto. 

Someone else jumps in with an attempt at harmony.

The phone beeps and Katherine puts another quarter into it; she’s wondering if she should try a different number when a new voice hops on the line. 

“Harrington’s Ambulance Fleet,” Steve says, “You maul ‘em, we’ll haul ‘em.”

A gust of wind whips a plastic bag against the side of the phonebooth, and Katherine leans against the thin walls. 

“Having fun, are you, Steve?” Katherine asks. 

“You bastards,” Steve hisses, and Katherine hears the other guys hooting with laughter as they dodge away from Steve. “Why didn’t you tell me—Kat, uh, hey, hi.”  
“Hey, hi, to you too,” she says, and then it occurs to her that she’s about to have this conversation and she has no idea where to start. 

“It’s, uh, good to hear you,” Steve says, voice sounding earnest, if a bit hushed. “You’re good, you’ve been good?” 

“Yeah, fine,” she says. “You?”

“Oh, sure, yeah. Listen, I meant to call, but, uh…” he trails off, and Katherine realizes he’s looking for an excuse and suddenly she doesn’t have to worry about words. 

“You’re a fucking coward, Steve,” she says. 

“Wait, what? Hold on—”

“No,” Katherine shakes her head, glaring at the plastic bag as it’s pulled off the glass of the booth, and down the street. “You figure out you’re my soulmate and immediately bail, go completely silent, then you’re going to sit here and ask me how I’m doing, like, how do you think I’ve been??”

“Kat, I just didn’t—”

“Didn’t what?” Katherine snaps. “Didn’t even want to unpack that? Consider any sort of implication? Do anything other than immediately insist that things stay the same even though they’re going to be different, whether we like it or not, no matter how we feel about it?”

“That’s easy to say,” Steve finally breaks in, “since you didn’t seem to be feeling any sort of way about it.”

“Are you serious right now? What reaction would you have liked?”

“I don’t know, maybe something other than ‘surprised’!”

“I was surprised!” Katherine sputters. “Besides, I didn’t know you knew already, had to find that out from Nancy, by the way, so thanks for that, and I was trying to be chill so you didn’t feel pressured to stay.”

“You talked to Nancy?”

“Nancy talked at me,” Katherine sighs. “Turns out, she’s sick of both of us moping, her word.”

The line is quiet, with a little bit of static as Steve plays with the phone cord. “Have you been?” he asks. 

Katherine pushes off the wall. “Have you?”

“Does it matter?” Steve mumbles, and Katherine wants to reach through the phone and slap him.

“Steve, what the hell, of course it matters.”

He’s quiet, and Katherine gets the sinking feeling that Nancy was right about the wanting and rejection and everything else.

The phone beeps. 

“What was that?” Steve asks, and Katherine looks at the timer, and the flashing light next to the keypad. 

“I’m at a payphone,” she says, sliding another quarter in. “We’re good.”

The beeping stops.

“Can I ask something?” Steve says, after a moment.

“Yeah,” Katherine says, thinking that it’s a start.

“When did you know?”

Katherine closes her eyes. “August,” she admits.

Steve lets out a huff of air into the microphone. “Damn.”

“Sorry,” Katherine says, voice quiet.

“No, uh,” Steve stops her, and he huffs a light laugh into the speaker. “It’s not that. It’s just... I knew in April.”

Katherine hears it like an echo. “Six months?”

“Yeah,” he says. 

Katherine leans against the booth again. “How?”

“It was at the diner,” Steve says, “when you cut your hand after the letter from Notre Dame. I thought you knew too.”

Katherine blinks. “What? How would I know?”

“I don’t know, the fights.”

“We’re going to need to talk about that at some point.” 

“Sure,” Steve says. “But when I found out, I thought you had to know, from all the bruises and stuff.”

Katherine closes her eyes. “You thought I was just choosing to ignore it.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, quiet. “I mean, it matched up. You wanted to go places, get out of Hawkins, and your fucking soulmate is the guy who lives next door.”

Katherine’s heart feels heavy, drenched with something she needs to wring out. “Steve, you know it’s not—”

“I stayed all summer, Kat.”

Katherine stops. “What does that mean?”

“Just in case,” he says. 

“In case what?”

Steve sighs. “I don’t know, in case I was wrong, and you didn’t know. Or you did, and I could change your mind. But..anyways, when you did find out, you didn’t react at all, so it felt like you didn’t want it.”

So that’s why he jumped so quickly to the friends thing, Katherine thinks. 

The phone beeps again, and Katherine fishes in her pocket; she’s out of quarters. 

“The call has like a minute left, Steve,” she says, “then I’m out of change.”

“Right,” he says.

Katherine pauses for a moment, thinking of all that she has left to say in sixty seconds. “You’re not a disappointment.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

“I mean it,” Katherine presses. “You’re a lot of things—weirdly protective of a bunch of 13 year-olds, not the best with grammar, too into Tom Cruise for your own good—”

“Keep going,” Steve says, “this is fun.”

“But you’re not a disappointment,” Katherine finishes. “Not as a friend, and not as a soulmate, or whatever. Not as anything, okay?”

The line is quiet.

“Thanks,” Steve says, and this time it sounds like he might almost believe her.

“No problem,” Katherine says.

“Um,” Steve starts, gathering himself. “I’ll still be home for Thanksgiving. If you wanted to talk about it. Then.”

“I think that would be good,” Katherine says. 

“Yeah?” Steve asks, something new on his voice.

“Yeah,” Katherine says, and she wants to laugh, unsure why.

“Cool. Okay, yeah. Well, the guys are all still here, so I’m not going to do the ‘you hang up’ thing.”

Katherine wants to ask if he would if they weren’t, but she doesn’t. 

“Fair,” she says instead. “Talk to you at Thanksgiving?”

“Thanksgiving,” Steve says.

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

She hangs up quickly, before the line can die on its own, and looks at the phone for a moment after she’s set it in the cradle. 

Hmm. 

Thanksgiving is a month and a half away. 

A lot can happen in a month and a half. 

But then again, a lot can happen in six months, or two years, or a childhood ago. 

Really, it’s not that long to wait at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you @reddit for the dorm answering service inspiration (beyond that i feel like it's a gimmick that i didn't come up with but i can't think of where it woulad be, so if anyone knows pls let me know!); thank you @nik_knows_nothing for beta reading/ghostwriting half of it.

**Author's Note:**

> THE RETURN OF NEON KING!! (am i procrastinating for finishing the waitress and the king, you know, maybe) this is part one, i have the second half mapped out but this has been sitting in my drafts forever so as soon as i got it updated, i needed to just publish. hope y'all like it!


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